I spent years painting and designing worlds for film, television, and theater — places that had to feel real, even when they weren’t.

So when I got to paint an alien sculpture for a toy store opening, it felt like the perfect little collision of everything I love: imagination, storytelling, color, character, and making a space feel just a little more alive.

This is the kind of work I love most — when an object stops being just an object and starts becoming part of the story of a place.

I also paint custom artwork from photographs, murals, objects, and pieces that help bring a room, brand, or memory to life. You can see more or inquire here: www.madebydames.com.

Not metaphorically. Not in the way people say travel “changes you.” I mean I physically opened a refrigerator door and found myself somewhere else entirely.

That’s how my experience began at Meow Wolf in Santa Fe.

Rooms folded into other rooms. Doors led to places they shouldn’t. Nothing followed the rules I understood, and somehow, that made perfect sense. It felt like stepping into a dream that didn’t ask permission to exist.

I remember thinking—this is what people must feel like on acid.

I never did acid.

I wanted to. Of course I did doesn’t everyone? I’ve always been drawn to anything that bends reality a little. Anything that loosens the grip of what’s expected and lets something stranger, more expansive, take its place.

But I was afraid I wouldn’t come back.

That fear started when I was thirteen.

A friend of my sister’s showed up at our house one day. His name was well, I should probably not say his name. I don’t remember what he was wearing, but I remember how he looked to me. Off. Like his rhythm didn’t match the room. He stared too long at nothing. Moved a beat too slow. When he did speak, he spoke like he was reaching for something just out of grasp.

He spent most of the time playing pinball. I asked my sister’s other friend if something was wrong with him. He said, “He did a lot of acid and just never came back.”

That was it. That sentence, paired with the way I saw him that moment, was enough for me. I never touched it. Because I didn’t want to leave and not recognize the person who returned. I also am not that into pinball and couldn’t imagine having to play it every day in my life to be tied to reality.

But walking through Meow Wolf, I realized something. You don’t need drugs to experience altered reality. You just need a doorway.

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It is different from painting. Painting makes me work for it. I have to adjust, ruin, fix, repaint, and negotiate with the thing until it finally decides what it wants to be. And even then it sometimes likes to continue to argue.

Digital art gives me a little instant gratification.

I run a filter. I push the contrast. I tweak the saturation until it sits right on the edge of too much. It feels a little like putting on makeup.

Same face. Different vibe.

The photo is still the photo. The place is still the place. But the color changes the mood. The contrast changes the memory. Suddenly, the image starts telling a different truth.

That is what happened with this Taos image.

I didn’t know I needed this version until I made it. The original photo held the place. This version holds the feeling.

Maybe that is what I am doing with memoir too.

Taking the same life, the same memories, the same old photographs, and adjusting the contrast until I can finally see what they were trying to show me.

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The second time, a widow.

When I was about six years old, my grandparents bought me a blue beret for my birthday because I said I wanted to be an artist.

Why? To travel the world, of course. Everyone knows artists have a lot of money and definitely aren’t starving.

I had my eyes set on Paris, so I started saving money in a giant plastic Coke bottle my dad got me for Christmas. His dog had chewed it up pretty good by the time it made its way to me, but it was still usable. The perfect container to house my dreams. What a metaphor for my up-and-coming life.

That same year, my mom bought me a sweatshirt with Singapore, Tokyo, and a few other cities printed across the front. It was mostly pink, blue, and yellow, and I wore that sweatshirt out.

When I got too big for it, I cut out the front with the cities on it and tucked it into one of the many totes I would carry with me over the next thirty years.

I still have it today.

Getting my license at sixteen felt like my first real act of freedom. Oh, the fun I had in that 1988 Monte Carlo I painted turquoise blue, with a 350 engine. I went everywhere.

By the time I met my husband, Patrick, I had already been to a bunch of different cities and a handful of countries, mostly traveling alone. I was always a little scared to leave the country, but I never let the fear stop me.

I think it’s important to see new things. To let your neurons fire in unfamiliar directions. To remind yourself the world is bigger than whatever room you are currently standing in.

When I met Patrick, he was as adventurous as I was, and that felt amazing. A travel buddy. Someone who not only wanted to go but had his own ideas about it.

Driving across the country was something I had never done before, and Taos was one of the places we passed through on that trip. We laughed so much along the way. Honestly, the things I remember most are not all the landmarks and such.

I remember laughing so hard while we sat in a ridiculous amount of traffic coming into Denver. I remember the photograph of the tree with the lightning. That memory sits at the top of my list.

When I look back at the other photos from that year, they stir things in me. I love photographs for that reason. I hate them for that reason. Writing all of this down and looking back at those images is happily painful. There is no other way to describe it. (Guess you have to do that when you are writing a memoir.)

I am happy to have experienced his love and the life we had, and it is painful to know it ended too soon, with so many dreams and goals unfinished. Unexplored. Unlived.

I feel that way about art. Writing. Friendships. Places. Versions of myself I was just beginning to understand.

There is such a constant presence of time moving forward, with or without you.

What a gift. What a nuisance. The not knowing. I mean, if I knew when I was going to go, I could probably plan things out more accordingly. At the very least, life would be distilled down to choosing only the most important moments.

But it all feels important to me.

That is why my life often feels like one long run-on sentence. My feelings, too. Maybe that is what being present is. Feeling both things at the same time.

When I look back at those photographs, they tell the story of a thirty-year-old married woman trekking through Taos, scared of a storm and also knowing she could survive one.

I meet her again when I see those images.

I meet the moment again.

But from a new perspective. A new angle. Through the lens of a woman who has lost her husband, survived the loss, and learned how to thrive despite the pain.

When I went back to Taos years later, I took that same road. I looked for that tree. Maybe it was the company in the car. Maybe it was because I was the one driving that time. Maybe grief changes the way the landscape lets itself be seen.

But I never found it.

Or maybe I just did not need to see it again.

I have been known to go back to places to collect a little part of myself that feels like it went missing there. Sometimes I find it. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I realize I don’t have to. And sometimes it is enough to have a piece of art fall out of me like this one.

Part of my Emotional Atmospheres series, this piece is built from real photographic moments combined into a single emotionally resonant frame.

Every image has a location. This one had a ghost.

Paid subscribers can keep reading for the behind-the-scenes story of “The Road”, the job that terrified me, the beach that stayed with me, and the part of myself I had to go back and reclaim.

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It wasn’t the biggest thing in the landscape. It didn’t demand attention. But something about it held the entire scene together. Quiet, grounded, completely itself.

I kept thinking about it after I left Taos. So I painted it.

This is my way of holding onto a moment that didn’t ask to be remembered—but stayed anyway.

Here’s the time lapse video.

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I used to get a terrifying feeling in my stomach when something went wrong. A physiological alarm. I was three years old the first time it hit, when my mom yelled “JOLENEEEEEEE!” from the other room.

Sheer terror rose in the pit of my belly. I grew to know it well: “The Stomach Drop.” In my short life, I’d learned that feeling meant one of three things:

1. Something has gone terribly wrong and it is my fault.

2. Someone found out something has gone wrong and it might be my fault.

3. Nothing is wrong, but I feel guilty anyway.

In 2012, I was somewhere between Pennsylvania and Colorado, driving west with no plan other than to get there. We dropped south into New Mexico. Taos wasn’t the destination; it was just where we ended up.

I remember the canyon opening up into rolling gold mountains—or maybe they were hills. They looked like someone had draped gold velvet over the earth. The sun was mind-blowing. I wondered: Are the sunsets always like this here?

Near the edge of the Rio Grande Gorge, the sky split open. It didn’t feel stable. It became one of the top ten moments in my history of travel. Light broke through in one direction; darkness gathered in another. It was the kind of sky that makes you stop without knowing why.

Everything happened at once: a rainbow cutting the background, lightning striking the distance, a storm sitting right in the center of it all.

And this tree.

It didn’t feel like a tree. It felt placed. A marker. Like it had something to say. I took one of the best photographs of my life in that moment—not because I planned it, but because I was standing in it.

I remember feeling unsettled. Not scared, not unsafe—just antsy. My stomach did that familiar drop. It was my first time in the desert and I didn’t know if I should be feeling excitement, fear, or awe. I guess I felt them all, which is why the stomach drop was there.

Seven years later, I went back to Taos. I almost didn’t; the first experience felt too remarkable to touch. But I like to challenge things—even nature—to show off.

This time, I brought two friends. Both strong, intelligent, opinionated women who had never met each other. Since they were both friends of mine, I thought they would get along. I thought it would be an easy trip.

It wasn’t.

There was friction. A tension between different ways of moving through the world. I remember watching it, not just as a participant, but as an observer. It was like that sunset years ago, but more unnerving.

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Nothing on a film set is accidental. All visual aspects are calculated to evoke a feeling—the way the light lands on an actress’s face, the intentional reflection in a window, the aging door at the front of a well-kept house. Someone made each of those decisions, and usually a dozen times in a dozen different ways, before they landed on “that’s the shot.”

I spent years working as a scenic artist on set, which is a strange job to explain, mostly because people don’t realize it exists. If something needed to be painted, aged, dulled, brightened, reflected differently, or completely reworked to read correctly on camera, it landed in my hands. Sometimes I had a decent amount of time to do the task, but often I didn’t.

It’s a chaotic, fast-moving environment with a lot of moving parts—so many that I often wonder how anything actually gets done.

I get called in when something isn’t working: a reflection is wrong, a color is off, a surface isn’t telling the right story.

And I fix it—not based on logic, but based on feel.

There were days I was adjusting the aging of a sticker by mere millimeters, knocking down a shine no one else noticed yet, or painting something with whatever was available—because the materials didn’t matter as much as the result. The camera would catch it, even if no one else could.

That’s the part people don’t understand. You’re not painting for what something is; you’re painting for how it reads. How it visually tells the story.

Over time, something shifts. You stop looking at things the way they are and start seeing them for what they’re doing—what they’re saying, what they’re reinforcing, what they’re quietly giving away.

A room isn’t just a room anymore. It’s a story, a signal, a set, a visual direction to another world.

And once that clicks, you can’t just turn it off. No matter where you go in the world.

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When I started writing, I was trying to define what it was… poetry, literature, short stories, essays? In the recesses of my mind, I have always wanted to write lyrics for music. Having no real background in writing, it’s hard to find your way. Also, who am I to be a writer anyway?

If you asked my late husband, he described me as a writer disguised as a painter. Hehehe… look how tricky I am. The truth is, I have been writing longer than I have been painting. The truth is, I have volumes of written words. The truth is, I have secretly been writing and submitting work for many years.

I just don’t talk about it.

People know me as a painter. An artist. And those are two of my many loves. What they don’t know is that when I sit down to write, it is literally like I am a musician at the keys. Things just flow from me. And I allow it.

Of course, not everything I write is good. It’s also not all bad. But how would you know unless I shared it?

So… I’m sharing it.

I want to invite you into this part of my work.

On a canvas, I show you how I see the world.

These lyrical essays, built on metaphor, are how I move through it—the moving images my mind creates as I go.

I don’t know about you, but I get lost in moments. Visual ones.

I’m usually in it before I understand it.

Something stands out.
Something feels slightly off.
Something lingers longer than it should.

And I stay with it.

A sunset.
A pebble.
A person.

And then—somewhere in that— something shifts.

Not because it was explained. Because I noticed it.

Not to understand it— but to see what reveals itself when you stop trying to.

Here’s one of those moments.

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This is what I couldn’t see while I was there, and some of the other behind-the-scenes of what…

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It had only been about six months since my husband died, and I c…

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And I wasn’t exaggerating when I said that.

The other thing is that when you create illusions for a living, it becomes really hard t…

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They’re not.

Everyone thinks movie sets are about creating something real.

They’re not.

They’re about creating something believable enough th…

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Not in a passive way. In a way that feels like listening.

The way a room holds tension. The way color can calm—or agitate—w…

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The Atlas is what lives beneath the surface—the pieces that don’t make it onto the main map. Early book drafts, private journal entries, lost writings, and the private podcast where I tell the storie…

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