I make art because I must. It’s a cellular need. It’s a compulsion, an addiction, a Beingness I cannot – and will not – deny.

Images dwell within me getting fat and juicy until they just simply will not allow me to sit on them one more minute. Many many nights I’ll wake up with designs in my head, all clamoring to come out at once, and I’ll have to get up and draw furiously till they’re out and happy.

When I was very young, I made a pact with myself not to do any artwork that depicts pain and suffering – why paint that when we see so much of it all around us, every day?

What I wanted – and still want – to see and surround myself with was expressions of the feeling I had in my heart about how I felt it could be, and really is, on levels we don’t normally think about or have visual access to during the glaring light of day.

I intend my work to do with joy, celebration, and the great, incredible depths of the invisible world that we inhabit, that inhabits us, and that swirls in un-nameable curling, flowing eddies in and all around us all the time.

Mood, emotion, feeling and the underlying spirit – this is what I love.

And rather than anatomical correctness, I see bodies as fluid and constantly changing in form and motion – I leave the anatomically perfect drawings and realistic renderings to those who are much better at them than I.

I prefer strange color combinations and exaggerated bodies and movement to depict emotion. The motion of the body; the expression of the heart; the glory of color; the voices of joy and wonder and connection with each other; the unity we each have with Spirit: these are the things that matter to me, that I draw, paint, and carve.

The older I get the looser my work seems to become. My hand flies, and my mind feels alive and connected to some amazing, enormous, endless source. I’m delighted with this work, no matter the medium – it makes me happy.

I appreciate your interest!

Angela Treat Lyon