Maypop 
Art

I guess I've been making art longer than I’ve known what to call it.

In kindergarten, I missed a timed worksheet because I got lost designing the negative space inside the letters of my name. The buzzer went off. I’d done nothing but make something beautiful in a space nobody else noticed.

At church with my great-grandmother — my Mamaw Wynne — I filled the Sunday pamphlets with clusters of organic, geometric little drawings while the sermon went on. The other ladies would find me afterward and tell me they’d seen me drawing during service. They didn’t fuss. They complimented my drawings. My grandmother hung those on her refrigerator. She was an angel. I held onto that for a long time.

Drawing always did something for me that nothing else could — it took me out of wherever I was and put me somewhere entirely my own.

I studied art. I almost got a BFA but got rejected the first time through the program because I didn’t know how to talk about my work. Didn’t know my story. Graduated with a BA instead and carried that quiet sting for years.

I’m still figuring out how to talk about it. But I kept making it.

May Pop Art is named for the maypop flower — a striking, unearthly-looking plant that flourishes in less than hospitable conditions. That felt right. I’m an abstract painter, a single mom, and a person with a full-time corporate job who makes art in the margins of her life. Sometimes my five-year-old daughter Willa Wilder adds her marks to my paintings. Those are always my favorite parts.

 I almost never know what I’m doing. I almost never know what I’m making until it’s done. I don’t know what colors I’m going to use beforehand. I don’t even know if I’m working on a series or not half the time. But I do know that creating art and expressing your creativity to share with others so that they may also feel beautiful human connection through mark making is incredibly magical