Heather Ryan

Art and the creative process is as natural for me as breathing. It is sometimes difficult to convey onto canvas without using words, my emotions about a subject when I turn to the brush. I feel it in my heart; I see it in my mind's eye, but how do I get it out of that place and onto the canvas? I have the technical skills, but how to paint an emotion? How do you make people see what you see and feel? It is this constant challenge that keeps me at my easel.
The frustration of being an artist, of course, relates to the fact that you are your own worst critic. Some of the frustration of being an artist is not in the perfection of one work of art, but the frustration of no time to work. All too often, while working on a painting, my mind is composing a new one. I am torn between stopping work on the one, and beginning the new. And this continued through my life - the frustration of not having enough time to finish all that I conceive.