Drop Your Leaves Each time I step up to the easel, I feel like a bare-limbed tree in winter. I’m not able to hide what’s going on around me or within me. And I don’t want to. Authentic expression in my art has helped me grow and continues to be liberating and empowering. My paintings are my visual diaries. When I look back, they tell me what I was going through the past twenty years. My early house portrait period in 2000-2002 was born out of a desire to create a happy home life. If I painted enough of them, I would have one, right?
June Rollins
beginning s with June Rollins Visit June’s website www.junerollins.com
From 2003-2005, a focus on creating texture inspired by peeling paint and rust was about transformative endings. I was searching for beauty and grace in aging and dying. In my life, relationships were ending and my parents were declining. From 2005-2009 there was a fascination with painting flowers and children. Planted, blooming, growing things gave me hope. New relationships in a new setting were giving me a new life. By 2009 I had grown comfortable, with my technique and subjects. I grew discontent which brought on a searching, struggling, floundering period of trying different mediums and not liking anything I did. I persevered. One afternoon in 2010, easily and effortlessly, a new world of flowing inks and abstracted landscapes emerged out of a spirit of play. Preceding and during the five years of daily, Alcohol Ink Dreamscaping, I was also daily, practicing contemplative prayer. In 2012, a relocation and change in lifestyle led to feeling lost and uprooted. From 2012-2017 I experimented with watercolor inks and acrylic portraiture. Neither, took hold of my heart. And then I tried oils. Traditional oils gave me that “beginner’s awe” again, and I was hooked. Since June 2017, painting small, expressive, animal portraits has been my passion. Their personified, and often humorous, range of emotions mirror my own and other’s. Each painting is a fun challenge and the positive, spontaneous responses from the public to my animals brings me joy. Painting from a place of drop-your-leaveshonesty, has been and continues to be this introvert’s way of communicating. Thank you for looking. Thank you for listening. Wishing us all, winter’s bare-limbed revelations,
“Just Can’t Get Enough,” 8x10, ©June Rollins 16
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