When I was nine, I painted a picture of a beach with a big palm tree. My parents hung it in the garage for many years, and since we were military people and moved frequently, that painting hung in many garages. I published my first poem in the Stars & Stripes (military paper) when I was twelve. So looking back, anyone could tell where I was headed. I wanted to create art. But in my family Art was not a profession. It was a hobby. And I ended up in businesses for decades doing things I loathed, like many other people who don’t follow their hearts. But art was my secret passion—elusive and yet always beckoning me. I wanted it. I studied with artist Jeff O’Connell in Los Angeles on weekends but went back to business during the week. Stolen moments was how I experienced it. But I loved learning to draw and paint realistic renditions of life.

Eventually I became an Editor and Publisher, moving me closer to the writing I loved, but still it was me working at a business. I supported a lot of new writers and artists in the print books and e-zine issues of Ink Pot and Literary Potpourri over five years. I closed Lit Pot Press in 2005 while caring for my aging mother full time. When she died in early 2006, I knew the whole world shifted. I was no longer anybody’s child. .

I had been submitting my own fiction and poetry since 1997 to small venues with some success, but at this point I took my first trip to Italy – and it was in Venice I realized that it was time, as Rilke said, to change my life. When, in San Marco Square, the pigeons swarmed to me, it was as if all the feathered, elusive dreams of my life had come to alight on my open hand. Venice was all beauty, all art, all that I had ever dreamed and I was filled with a joy that is hard to describe. Filled to overflowing with freedom, like the birds..

I returned to California, sold everything and moved to Asheville where the energy and beautiful mountains are so intense that the urge to paint again overtook me. But this time a series of inner impulses begged to be expressed in the abstract form. I wanted to explore the inner reality, my new inner landscape and new freedom.

There is a mystery between artist and viewer. It's unspoken, unexplained--but is a communication -- the person seeing art takes a message from the painting that embraces his own reality, while the painter pours his own meanings (however unconscious) into the work. It's an occult exchange, one that can't quite be duplicated with the written word. It's the language of imagination and imagery, of color and supposition, of forms and archetypes. It feels very primal to me--not unlike prehistoric cave walls, still being deciphered and interpreted today. That relationship excites me. I want to be gotten and I want to affect the psyches of others.

The artist is the bird and the viewer is an open hand. And as an emotional transaction takes place, the process shifts so the viewer is the bird and the artist is the open hand. It’s a delightful and enthralling experience for me..

So what is the head? Perhaps the critic.?.

Thank you for visiting my art.

Bev Jackson