My friend Jack gave me the idea to paint the song "Million Reasons" by Lady Gaga. One day he sent me a message telling me he was sitting in his car listening to the song, thinking of me and crying. I had recently gotten myself out of an incredibly toxic, abusive situation and was working hard to break the cycles and energetic patterns that had gotten me into the situation in the first place. That's exactly what the song was about, and it resonated so deeply with my journey. I could relate to so many of the lyrics. This painting ended up challenging me more than any other in the series that I’ve done. I started it months before I was able to finish it. The weekend I finally got it back out to work on, I painted a lot of the weekend and finally had to give up and walk away in utter frustration. I just couldn’t figure out where to take the piece. Nothing felt right with it. Nothing I did with the paint seemed to work. I began thinking of the life lesson behind it, and maybe what the painting was teaching me was that I could no longer do things the same way if I expected to grow and evolve. As a person if I was thinking of the song, and as an artist if I was talking about paint. I realized it was time to take what I’d learned and forge a new way of being, as difficult and uncomfortable as the process was and can be. What you see in the photos is layers and layers and layers; layers of anger, layers of sadness, layers of passion and desperation. I put everything I had left onto the canvas, millions of little words, millions of feelings and millions of reasons to leave my old life behind. And when I finally finished MILLION REASONS, I knew it would be the last piece in the series, the piece that broke the mold - my mold - and the piece that helped me start anew.

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