M. J. Casteel

M. J. is a visual artist, writer, speaker, and arm-chair activist, with a perfectly unassuming day job. Her dark arts include transforming everyday trash into fun things to hang on your wall, cooking, herbology, gardening, and bringing down the racist-oligarchical-patriarchy, one heated argument with an unsuspecting passerby at a time.

Her career as a miserly crone started nearly at birth, but her career as an artist took hold during high school, under the tutelage of one of the finest artists and art teachers that ever lived. After college, she taught high school art for four years in a rural community, before heading off to her post-graduate studies to find a better paying and more socially regarded career in a more traditional profession.

After years of internal conflict focused on the dichotomy of her professional and creative life, she has managed to scrape out a small corner of personal fulfillment and satisfaction in the mere act of continuing to create things. Today, that small corner of satisfaction has become an alter upon which she sacrifices the remaining meaningful moments that she calls her own, by creating art to escape the hard truths about humanity that she confronts in her professional life - which mostly involve small triumphs in the face of an ongoing onslaught of human anguish and self-inflicted pain that no amount of money will fix.

Her creative work focuses on bright colors, dense, meticulously detailed compositions, and natural subject matters. If you are looking for deep meaningful artwork, at which you can meditatively gaze, for hours at a time, pondering the cosmic truth intended by the artist - you should shop elsewhere. This is work that intends to meet the superficial needs of romantics, and lovers of all things “pretty” and “happy.” Meditate upon gazing at it if you wish, and only if it feels right to do so. As with all things, there are some less than happy works among her vast portfolio, however the viewer is advised away from trying too hard to find a deeper, more pretentiously posited truth therein - unless you seek to find that truth within yourself. The eyes of the beholder. You are free to project onto the art, any kind of meaning you like.