What I Mean When I Say Emotional Weather
I Am Large Where I Break, 48×72 diptych, mixed media on canvas
When I use the phrase emotional weather, I’m not talking about mood.
I’m talking about something lived — something that moves through the body the way pressure systems move through air. The way heat gathers. The way fog settles without asking permission.
Emotional weather isn’t an idea I apply to the work. It’s the condition the work emerges from.
I experience emotion physically: as density, temperature, weight, resistance, release. Some days feel charged and brittle. Others feel heavy and low. Sometimes there’s a sense of suspension — as if something is about to break open, or clear, or pass through.
This is the material I’m working with.
The body holds what the mind hasn’t yet sorted. It absorbs what happens around us — personally and collectively — and carries it quietly until it finds a way to move. Painting, for me, is one of the ways that movement becomes visible.
Weather is never static. It’s process. It shifts, collides, dissipates, returns. It doesn’t resolve neatly, and it doesn’t belong to a single moment. Emotional weather works the same way. It’s layered. It contains contradiction. It changes while still bearing traces of what came before.
This is why abstraction is essential to my practice. There’s no single image or narrative that can hold this kind of experience without reducing it. Abstraction allows sensation to remain sensation. It lets ambiguity stay intact.
When I’m painting, I’m not trying to illustrate a feeling. I’m responding to pressure, rhythm, accumulation, and release — allowing the work to register what’s moving through me rather than naming it too quickly.
Emotional weather doesn’t ask to be explained.
It asks to be felt, noticed, and given space to move.
Notice what stays with you.
