Gaia (Vienna 2013)
“If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced,” Vincent Van Gogh wrote in a letter to his brother Theo in 1882.
That conviction resonates at the core of everything I paint.
I paint because I am an Overcomer. My life, like my canvases, is built up with layers as well in various — and often rough — textures.
The suicide of my mother at age 17, years of depression, seasons of addiction, and through it all a relentless, mysterious force of creation and re-creation propelling me forward.
That is what Art for Overcomers means. It is totally honest art. I build over the layers the way life builds over pain until the final layer catches the light, and you know God was behind it all along.
My paintings migrate between the abstract, the figurative, and the gestural, evoking what I call a “mindscape” — secret intuitions, miraculous possibilities, signals that something or Someone somehow is reassembling out of sight the scattered puzzle pieces.
Surreal cities, ancient trees, angelic presences, mysterious swells along with swirls and surges — all inhabit my canvases because they remind us that while everything is chaotic and fleeting. But it is the act of creation itself that endures.
Painting is power — the power of color and texture!
But it is also the power that frees us from our frailties and disabilities. For me, that freedom came through letting go of phobias, doubts, and the distracting weight of everything I was told I could not do. When we truly let go, we let God.
Every canvas becomes an invitation to start down a winding road each one of us at some time for some reason have walked in our own unique way. It is an invitation for each of you to perform something you didn’t realize you could perform.
It is a summons to make your own statement with tools and talents you never thought you had.
My work is an extra-sensory adventure in color, tonality, and texture that reaches beyond the merely perceptible to show you there is something much, much more.
I invite you to view my work and steal a glimpse of what Overcomers see —that God was always there, and so was beauty, waiting to be discovered like the glint of a bright gem that you didn’t expect to find in the midst of some old costume jewelry you were about to throw away.
-Sunny Raschke