Hamilton Perkins Collection

I REMEMBER MY FIRST PAINTING LIKE IT WAS YESTERDAY. I named it Amygdala. It’s actually a pretty bad painting, but it’s beautiful to me. That first painting gave me back my joy. The joy I desperately wanted to find when I was forced to turn off mommy mode and go into warrior mode during twenty years in the Navy and three combat tours. The joy I searched so hard for when I was bedridden for two years after battling cancer. So much emotion and pain was poured onto that canvas. I didn’t expect anything from it, but it gave me so much back in return. In my deepest darkest depression, my therapist wrote me a prescription to watch Bob Ross videos. I thought he was full of it. But when I do something, I go all in. It didn’t take long for those happy little trees to win me over, but there was just one problem. I WANTED TO PAINT, BUT I COULDN’T. It’s not that I didn’t have the skills — I got a scholarship to NYU for graphic design, used to do hand lettering, and even tagged a few walls in my graffiti days. I may have l