“Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning,” Psalm 30 proclaims.  I kept searching for that joy during an Easter season of death and loss and found it amid the swirls of varied texture and color in this painting.  I never found joy standing alone, isolated from suffering, but instead flashes and swirls of joy in the midst of it.  That kind of joy is never a lie.

The artist in me was set free at a conference on Creation Spirituality led by Matthew Fox in 1991.  There, in a workshop on Art and the Psalms, the instructor responded to my “oops” with the words, “there is no oops in art,” and decades of shackles fell away.  I have been painting, drawing, sculpting and printing ever since.