ARTIST STATEMENT

I was a horribly shy child. But I was always able to make art—to speak through art. It’s my first and strongest language. As far back as I can remember, I could always draw and paint and play piano and act and write.

Not only did I want to do it all, I had to.

You could blame it on the wound of shyness or you could blame the shyness on the terrifying bigness of the voice within. Whatever this knot is inside of me, the need for expression has always been impossible to ignore.

For the last decade, I’ve been a writer and a filmmaker. I’m lucky to have sold screenplays and to have directed films. In college I took classes in drawing and painting but at a certain point I made the decision to focus on storytelling. It felt like cutting off a limb to do so, but I stopped my art practice and put my blinders on to study story structure and character development. I was in the rat race before I realized it.

At a certain point I hit burnout. After nearly a decade in Los Angeles, I became depleted after years of waiting for projects to get made and getting physically sick from writing and producing and directing and editing and pushing-pushing-pushing my own projects forward.

So I came back home to Door County, Wisconsin and I started painting again. To feel a sense of expression that wasn’t wrapped up in film budgets and marketing. To feel closer to the nature that was healing me here. To love my own individual life again.

To declare that the beauty in front of me was enough.

When I paint, I don’t have to wait for anyone to sign off on it. I can paint as much as I want. No one can stop me.

Painting has been a saving grace. It has shown me the dusky golds of a meadow, the lavender undersides of summer clouds, the gritty plums of Lake Michigan. And it keeps evolving. I love watching it evolve, like nature.

I’ll always write. I’ll always make films. But now that I’ve given painting (that missing limb) a chance, I know that I’ll also always paint.

It strikes me that painting is the quiet art form that I never wanted to allow myself to indulge in when I was younger. I always felt that being a shy child meant that I needed to become a loud, successful adult so that nobody would ever know that most of the time I’d prefer to be alone making art, quiet in my own world!

It’s been such a gift to return to painting, to my quiet world. This is the place where everything I create comes from. It’s in the quiet where everything begins. It’s such a pleasure to share my quiet world with you.

-Rebecca