Detail from Fairy Tale Painting

Resistance:  The refusal to accept or comply.  Alice Walker understood it as the secret of joy.

Growing up, silence was my resistance.  Self-imposed isolation was my resistance.  Living in the pages of The Lord of the Rings and The Bell Jar; swimming through the lyrics of She’s Leaving Home [Beatles] and It’s My Life [The Animals]; meandering through the dream world of my heart was my resistance, my rebellion.  I’ve always been drawn to the Rebel Archetype:  to James Dean and Georgia O’Keeffe; to Leonard Peltier and bell hooks.

The last room of my Summer 2015 Art exhibit was devoted to Resistance.  The room was filled with paintings, collages, sculptures, and paper mache figures of wolves and the wild woman, both of whom are archetypes that survived persecution by thriving in the wilderness, in the shadows.  My purpose in creating the Resistance Room was to raise awareness and to inspire viewers to transform a torturous historical past into a meaningful and positive vision of the future.  There are hidden gifts in the path less traveled of She Who Will Not Be Tamed.

A gypsy is a rebel. A gypsy is guided by resistance…born with the willingness to sacrifice certainty for freedom, for adventure, for the endless horizon.  When your heart shows the way, resist the mind’s fear….when doubters penetrate your boundaries, resist their negativity.  We all have a bit of the gypsy inside us…a bit of the wolf….of the wild woman.  Connect to that spirit, and in so doing, welcome your joy.