The DAYDREAMS Collection was inspired by 3 things:
1. Coronavirus/ Stay-at-home measures
Like many others around the world, I spent a lot of time alone during the Coronavirus outbreak in 2020. During this time I found myself often daydreaming of places I’ve been before and want to revisit, including North Carolina, Arizona, New Mexico, Hawaii, Scotland, and my home state West Virginia. The urge to travel and explore while being confined to the 10-mile radius near our house led me to paint the places I was thinking about.
2. The book Awakenings by Oliver Sacks
“Awakenings” is a series of case studies of people who were victims of the ‘sleeping sickness’ in the 1920s. These people were frozen for decades in a trance-like state until 1969, when they were given a drug called L-DOPA and suddenly woke up to a very changed world. I related this to quarantine/isolation during stay-at-home measures during Coronavirus. Obviously as we come out of isolation it’s nowhere near the extreme change those people must have experienced. However, it’s something we’ve never experienced in our lifetimes and I can only imagine how different everything will feel when we’re able to freely move and congregate again, and how we’re going to experience a new appreciation for small freedoms that we normally take for granted.
3. The Sun and the Moon
The sun and the moon are the main visual elements that appear in these paintings and tie everything together. Why the sun and the moon? For one thing, I just love the moon. It gives me a feeling of awe and wonder every single night- that’s a pretty amazing thing! The sun teaches us that every day begins anew, while the moon teaches us that things are not always as they appear. There are phases where we perceive that the moon is not full; yet in reality, the moon is always full, it's just that we only see the part that is lit up. For me, this is a daily reminder that just because we can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there.