Long before the color, there were small, quiet, gentle color palettes with stories.
Welcome to the Menagerie Kingdom. A small, quiet world made with watercolor and gouache that was the original place of inception for the colorful and symbolic art you find on my page.
When I became unhappy with the simple portraiture I had been creating for almost 20 years of my career, the restlessness had me do a deep dive, and one of the places I landed on was my heritage, French Canadian, German, and Polish folk traditions that I had avoided most of my life because of some challenging parts of my lineage. In coming back to myself, my heritage became deeply important to my healing.
It started in a sketchbook, where I wasn’t just exploring heritage, I was a professional artist under pressure, and I felt I had lost the joy. So while exploring, I let things be explorative with no pressure. I let my hand and heart follow the tools and just create things from my soul. Of course, over time I refined and refined, as one who has been a professional artist for two decades does. It’s hard to not want to refine, and that refinement and color shift to a more color palette is what brings us to the work you see on my timeline.
But the inception, the seed, the birthplace of the work, started calling to me again to come and play. So I’ve returned, and in that homecoming, I found another safe place to create. Of course, it doesn’t quite fit in the feed, but if you want to follow it, you can find the Menagerie Kingdom on Instagram @menageriekingdom and on Facebook
There are some cool book and publishing projects coming along with this too.
