Painting With Purpose #1: The Semester I Created Nightmares

“Why is all your work so bright and happy?”

I get asked that a lot. And not always in a kind way. Some people say it with curiosity. Others say it like they’re suspicious. Like joy is naive.

The truth is, I choose to paint joy. I choose color and light and energy on purpose. And that choice didn’t come from comfort—it came from contrast.

Let me tell you about a semester that changed everything.

For years, it felt like art had a dark side. Not just a moody palette or a little edge—I mean dark. Artist after artist leaned into the grotesque. Broken bodies. Twisted faces. Blood. Machinery. Chaos. It was everywhere, and honestly, it made me uncomfortable.

But I never gave it much thought until I got stuck with it.

Back in college, we had this semester-long design project for one of my intro classes. We were told to choose a famous artist as our "client" and base all of our interior design work on their art. Floorplans, color palettes, material boards, everything had to come from the world they had created. It was a cool idea. In theory.

The professor went around the room asking for our picks. I was sitting on the far side—rookie mistake. By the time she got to me, every name I could think of was already taken. Monet, Van Gogh, O'Keeffe, Kandinsky. Gone. My friend and I scrambled, phones out, trying to find someone. A quick Google search spit out "Top 5 Most Famous Artists Right Now."

She took the first name. I took the second.

A few minutes later, we were told to pull up our artist's work. I clicked the link and there he was: H.R. Giger. The guy who designed the creature from Alien. I wish I were joking. At the time, he was deep into this biomechanical phase—human bodies fused with metal, skin stretched over cables, wires running through organs. Everything looked like a nightmare you couldn't wake up from.

I just sat there staring at the screen.

This was my inspiration for the next four months.

To be fair, the project was kind of entertaining. It became a game of what idea could I come up with that was wilder than the last. Most of my class was giving me suggestions on new and horrible ideas to incorporate. It was a wild challenge trying to interpret his visual world into something inhabitable. I ended up designing this fantastically creepy bedroom where the bed felt like a cocoon and the fabrics were reminiscent of scales.

It pushed me way out of my comfort zone, which is what I believe school is for: stretching and growing. But I never connected with it. I respected the technique, sure. But the energy of it? The message behind it? That room didn't feel like one I wanted to live in. Or help create. I’m glad it wasn’t a really project.

And we won’t even mention the nightmares I had over the semester of monsters and machines and maze like structures.

I get that horror has a place in art. It has its own job and function. And I know Giger was a visionary in his own right. I learned to appreciate his work and the message of it over the semester. But that's just not me.

That semester made something clear: I don’t want to create work of any kind that disturbs. As an interior designer, that meant creating warm, welcoming, intuitive spaces that people actually wanted to use and live in. Now, as a fine artist, it means creating warm, welcoming, energetic art that invites people to look at it, to live with it, to be inspired by it.

Next week, I’ll tell you more about what happened after that class—and how I started finding my voice as an artist. A different kind of voice.