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12 x 12 inches (30 × 30 cm)
Acrylic on Board, 2025
MN-039
I once asked a question from a place of incompleteness. I was lost and lonely. I was young and dumb. I was still cleansing myself of the poison of an adult world’s lies.
Born from desperation and clinging and seed was toxic. The game was fixed. We never had a chance.
We tried. We tried. We tried.
Without the manual to ourselves. Without the manual to each other. We made everything better for a day, and worse for a decade.
One of us lived. One of us died.
We both got out.
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12 x 12 inches (30 × 30 cm)
Acrylic on Board, 2025
MN-038
The stars come out. The ocean tides rise. Nature spreads its seed on the evening wind.
I think of love found. I think of love lost.
The mountain was once the sea, and the sea once the mountain. And I’m a human who lives brief moments as the sea, as the mountain, sparkling through moments of love.
Hot, wet love drips as paint on boards to echo the moments where sky merges with blood, crushed by rock, fed to ocean, under the watchful gaze of moonlight.
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12 x 12 inches (30 × 30 cm)
Acrylic on Board, 2025
MN-037
She broke my heart, and I broke hers. We broke each other’s hearts a dozen times over seventeen years. Her worst brought out my best, and her best brought out my worst.
If I had the strength to leave, she may still be alive today. Instead she’s eleven years buried in the ground next to a shady tree.
Childish love clings. Kind love says goodbye. I weep for the gifts we were not strong enough to give.
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12 x 12 inches (30 × 30 cm)
Acrylic on Board, 2025
MN-036
Lighting crash
Boulders roll
Pettles rain
Captured the moon
Begin again
Fertile ground
Bury yourself
Give up
Give in
Futile desires on fertile ground
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12 x 12 inches (30 × 30 cm)
Acrylic on Board, 2025
MN-035
Ghosts of the mountain
how you howl and
yearn for release from
trapped souls
in the blood of acid rain.
Seismic rifts
Flaming fire from the sky
Trodden bones
Force from the flatness
of your former plains
Jutted up to the sky
Forever yearning to fall
into flatness
The rain brings release
a spec of dust at a time
Returning to sea
Filling the ocean trenches
Ice cracks boulders
Avalanche
A sigh of release
Let me go
Let me fall
Let me return home
To the sea
To the plain
The weight of jutting to the sky
The coldness of the peaks
The tiresome striving
To stay upright
To be strong
To be grounded
Carrying the weight of a million longing eyes
Let me lie
Lie flat on the plain
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12 x 12 inches (30 × 30 cm)
Acrylic on Board, 2025
MN-034
1996, in junior college Figure Drawing II class, Monica shares how the human form is made up of only convex shapes. Any concave shapes are actually a result of two convex shapes next to each other.
My brain takes that in and relates it to atoms and molecules, and to the rhythms of fractals and chaos theory. I was really into the science of how the world makes choices in growing structures.
All patterns of life repeat. They repeat on the microscopic and continental levels, and everything in between. Think of how fern leaves and river tributaries mimic their shape and structure in the most delicious ways.
The circles and spheres of the building blocks of matter start showing up in my work around then. Do I draw the figure in my Figure Drawing II class, or do I draw the molecules that make up the matter of the figures? It was a major question for me at the time, and something I carry with me today.
The building blocks of life are as important to me in my art as are painting forms my senses can detect. The “both, and” of the patterns and molecules and the shape, color, and texture of life.
This painting captures the feeling of hiking in the mountains, with only the color blue everywhere I look.
12 x 12 inches (30 × 30 cm)
Acrylic on Board, 2025
MN-033
The silence between the notes is the song. The act of cutting away is a courageous act that makes the art. Without the courage and discernment to cut things, even favorite things, art, like life, becomes a muddled mess.
Only by cutting what no longer serves the whole can the true meaning of the work come through. In art, this can mean painting over my favorite parts to shift the focus to how I want you to feel when you view the piece.
The history is still there. The love. The attention. The weight.
And I’ve diverted your attention to the most important parts of the story my heart wants you to know about. In this piece, it’s blue. I want you to see the blue and imagine the world around you growing in shades of blue.
The feeling of being underwater at the same time as wandering in a forest. Always more. Life and decay. Just blue.
12 x 12 inches (30 × 30 cm)
Acrylic on Board, 2025
MN-032
For millions of years, the Earth has called our solar system home. The layers of bedrock hold the history of the planet we have audaciously claimed as our own.
The mountain knows we are only a speck on the timeline of its life of millions of years. Our impact, even our biggest bombs, pale in comparison to the violence she has lived through from meteor impacts to ice ages to earthquakes that break continents in two.
Life is here. Life is a gift. Through every devastation, she breeds new life.
In the shadow of a planet, humans are not special. We have no power. We have no longevity. We are powerless specs of pompous, selfish, self-righteous ooze.
Even our made-up “gods” have no power in comparison to one minute of sunlight or one rotation of the planet. Our gods only hasten our motivation to poison the surface of the planet, hastening the destruction of our own species.
Flowers will still grow on the resting hill of humanity's last grave.
12 x 12 inches (30 × 30 cm)
Acrylic on Board, 2025
MN-031
The sun rises. The leaves fall. The rain floods. The mountains slide.
The sins of our ancestors are buried under layers of gravel.
Spring renews. Life finds its way.
We move on.
We move forward.
We chase the sunrise.
We relish the night.
When I was in 5th or 6th grade, I got a report from the dentist that included my first cavity. I was crushed. The good boy I was admonished to be by my mother, Sunday school, and Jesus was terrified.
Belonging was the hardest marker of safety for me to find in childhood. Being put out of the school group, the community, the family was my biggest fear.
On any good day, I was barely accepted and included in the group.
That cavity was a death sentence. I broke one of the only social contracts I could actually understand with my neurodivergent, socially blind, young brain.
I spent an hour brushing my teeth that night with the hope of undoing the damage I had caused.
My logic knew from experience in school, church, and home that rules are hidden and mysterious, and the consequences severe. Keeping my teeth clean was one of the few things I thought was in my control.
I broke a social contract. I knew I had broken a social contract, unlike the dozens of other social contracts I broke at school every day, and I didn’t know; I only felt the impact. This one, I thought I could fix with violent and relentless brushing.
I failed. I still had the cavity. I punished myself, nonetheless.
I got a filling for the cavity. The first of many in the young-to-teenage years.
It turns out I was ok. Getting a cavity didn’t actually get me kicked out of the tribe that I needed for basic safety.
Lots of other things did, however. F*ck me if I ever actually knew what I did to get rejected.
I’ve given up on trying to rewrite my history.
I’ve given up on knowing “why” it was so hard to grow up.
I’ve given up on finding the perfect algorithm of detection and behavior to “pass” as neurotypical and socially adept.
Take me as I am. Accommodate me. Make requests and agreements to get your needs met. Look me in the eye and tell me how you feel and the impact I have.
Don’t make me guess what you expect me to do.
I’m exhausted.
12 x 12 inches (30 × 30 cm)
Acrylic on Board, 2025
MN-030
I have a desire for my paintings to be about two things interacting with each other. That is the essence of relationship. You might say that my paintings are all about relationships. This one certainly is.
Maintaining relationships ranks high in my personal values. I cannot see myself but in relation to another. I may as well be invisible without my relationships.
The beauty of relationship is the differences between those relating. Just like colors in a painting are impacted by the colors next to them, so am I impacted by those in proximity to me.
Parts of me look bigger or smaller, more vibrant or muted, depending on the one I’m next to. I get to celebrate different parts of myself in each new relationship I make.
In this painting, Blue Spark of Life, the warm spark may draw you in, but the relationship is about the yellow sticks in relation to the blue sticks. The attraction and aversion of how they relate mimics the relationship of friends and lovers who are so close, but still so far.
12 x 12 inches (30 × 30 cm)
Acrylic on Board, 2025
MN-029
There was a time in 4th grade when my favorite teacher ever, Mr. Wehmeyer, taught me how to draw in perspective. It totally blew my mind. It was the first time a teacher had taken an interest in me. Looking back, 4th grade was also the year the adults in my life should have discovered that I was dyslexic, if not actually diagnosing me with neurodivergence.
So I get this amazing skill that lets me start to create the things in my mind, at least the buildings, by only using paper, pencil, a ruler, and two dots. My mind was truly blown.
I was obsessed. I kept pushing the bounds of what was possible to draw with two-point perspective. I experimented with other types of perspective. I was a huge upgrade from the graph paper that had been my only drawing tool before then. I was actually able to see things on paper that were from my imagination.
My imagination ate it up!
It was a nice consolation prize to the otherwise horrid experience of being in school with undiagnosed differences that prevented me from social integration.
12 x 12 inches (30 × 30 cm)
Acrylic on Board, 2025
MN-022
12 x 12 inches (30 × 30 cm)
Acrylic on Board, 2025
MN-040
One day the sun rose and I rose with it. The pain was distant. The tears mostly dry. The night dream demons more friend then foe.
Step. Step. Step.
The grind. Get lost in the grind. Each day more sunshine.
The forgiveness was the hard part. I forgive me. I forgive you.
Gratitude was the hard part. I’m grateful to you. I’m grateful to me.
Then a new life starts. Day one. Day two.
I would not know me if I met them. I would weep at the site of that former me.
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