Memoirs of An Artist
Before I painted, I survived.
The full story behind the work — the hard parts and the holy ones.
These pages cover domestic violence, the trauma of children harmed by adults, surviving a natural disaster while pregnant, and chronic illness. If now isn't the right time to read them, that's okay. The art is always here.
Before there was a marriage, before there was Florida, before there was paint — there was a girl growing up in Slidell, Louisiana, in a house where love wasn't always steady.
I did not have a roadmap for healthy romantic love.
I did not know what tender was supposed to feel like, or what safe was supposed to sound like, or what it was supposed to look like to be loved on an ordinary day when nothing was wrong.
I learned love the way most girls learn it — from what was around me. And what was around me did not always teach me what love actually is.
That is not a confession.
It is a context.
Because when you grow up without seeing healthy modeled in front of you, you don't recognize unhealthy when it shows up. It just looks like life. It just looks like Tuesday.
And you walk straight into it, because how else would you know to walk around it?
This story is not about blame.
It is about a girl who did not yet know what she would have to learn — and who had to learn it the hard way, more than once.
"You can't recognize the storm if it's the only weather you've ever known."
Before I lived through any of what came next, before the storms — both literal and the kind that walk through your front door — there was art.
It runs in my family.
My grandfather, Louis Karno, was a gifted artist who worked across several mediums. One of my favorite things he ever made was a small portrait of my Chihuahua, Trè Bug. His sister, Mollyne Karnofsky, was an artist too. There were others in the family I never even got to meet — a line of people who reached for paint, charcoal, clay, anything that would let them make beauty out of what they saw.
My sister, Stephanie Karno, is one of the great loves of my life and one of my greatest inspirations. She works primarily in acrylic and oil, and her paintings carry a kind of fearless soul that has shaped me as much as anyone in this story. I grew up next to a sister who painted — and that meant I grew up next to permission.
And then there was Momma Kim, who is like a second mother to me, and who nurtured my artistic spirit in a way no one else around me did. She encouraged me to explore, to create, to trust what came naturally. The seed was planted in those early years.
I grew up between New Orleans and the Northshore, surrounded by a kind of creative gravity I did not yet have a name for. I took a few art classes in high school, but at the time, art was simply something I loved — not yet something I fully understood.
That understanding would come much later.
It would come when I needed it most.
I was seventeen when I got pregnant with my oldest son.
I moved with his father from Slidell to Jacksonville, Florida, into a part of town that was harder than I knew how to navigate at the time. My son was born in November 2001, right after I turned eighteen.
It did not work.
I do not want to spend a lot of pages on what went wrong there, because the truth is, two very young people who were not ready tried something neither of us had the tools for. He was not ready to be a father. He has still not become one. The days I spent waiting for him to show up to his own home, and his own son, were the days I learned that loneliness inside a relationship is still loneliness.
When my son was eleven months old, I packed what I had and went home to my mom in Slidell.
That was the first time I left something I was not supposed to stay in.
It would not be the last.
I came home to Slidell when my son was eleven months old. Within weeks, I started dating someone I had known since the eighth grade. By 2003, we were married.
Over the next several years, we built a life and a family. Three more children. A home that moved between Louisiana and Mississippi.
And in the middle of all of that — Hurricane Katrina.
Katrina, August 2005
I was seven months pregnant with my daughter when Katrina hit. At home, I had a one-year-old and a three-year-old.
A tree came through our house.
For nearly a month after the storm, we lived without running water or electricity. The house was crowded with whoever needed shelter. Everyone slept in the living room with the doors and windows open, a generator running, a single fan trying to make the heat bearable. It felt like it would never end.
I remember bathing in the backyard with a gallon of water being poured slowly over my head.
I remember trying to get through each day.
I remember my children getting impetigo because of the conditions.
I remember eating MREs day after day and doing whatever I had to do to keep going.
That season changed me. It taught me what survival feels like in the body. It taught me how quickly a life can become unrecognizable. It taught me what it means to be vulnerable and responsible at the same time. It taught me how much a mother can carry when there is no other option.
The Years After
After Katrina, we kept going. We had a fourth child in 2011. We tried to make a marriage work that did not always know how to be one.
I will not spend pages picking it apart now, because the simplest, most honest thing I can say is this: the marriage wasn't healthy, and we both deserved better.
In 2012, we moved as a family to Gulf Breeze, Florida. He worked offshore. I told myself a beautiful place would be a good place to start over.
But the truth I was carrying in private was that the marriage was already over. I had tried to leave before and lost my nerve every time. I was afraid I would not be able to make it on my own.
I had spent years quietly disappearing inside my own life.
We separated later that same year.
The divorce was final in 2015.
For the first time since I was a teenager, I was a single mother of four — and the only person deciding who I was, was me.
I thought I had survived the storm.
The real one was still ahead.
"There is no part of a mother that gets to set it down."
In 2013, I met a man who would become the hardest chapter of my life.
He presented himself as stable. Successful. Put together. The kind of man who looked like the answer to everything I had not had. I believed in what I thought I saw. I fell for the version of life that seemed possible.
Then he moved in with me, and slowly, everything began to snowball.
I want to be honest about what came next, because I think too many women are taught to be vague about it. Vague keeps you alone. Vague is how you start to wonder if you're imagining it. So I am going to name it.
What I survived was domestic violence.
It was emotional.
It was verbal.
It was financial.
It was psychological.
It was physical.
It was isolation, control, and gaslighting woven so tightly together that I lost track of where one ended and the next began.
It was not one moment. It was thousands. It was the way the air in my own home changed when his key hit the lock. It was the way I learned to make my voice smaller, my needs invisible, my opinions quieter, my truth easier to swallow. It was the way I started to question my own reality so often that "what really happened" stopped feeling like something I could answer.
I know now that this is what abuse does. It is rarely visible from the outside. It is rarely one big thing the way movies make it look. Sometimes it is the way someone holds your money. Sometimes it is the way they make you doubt the friends who used to know you. Sometimes it is the way they teach you that your truth is dangerous and your voice is too much.
Sometimes it is all of those things at once.
People who have not lived through it ask why women stay. I will tell you. We stay because we are afraid. We stay because we are exhausted. We stay because we are isolated. We stay because we have children. We stay because we do not know who we would be on the other side of leaving. We stay because the man we leave is sometimes more dangerous than the man we live with.
And — this is the part no one says out loud — we stay because we have not yet learned how to be alone.
I had two more children during those years. They were born in safety, loved fiercely from the first breath. They did not deserve any of what was around them. Neither did my older four. Neither did I.
By the summer of 2017, my body began to do what my heart had not been allowed to. I was diagnosed with cutaneous discoid lupus in August. My immune system had been carrying years of cortisol and fear, and it was beginning to attack me from the inside out.
I now understand that diagnosis as my body finally refusing to keep his secret.
On November 3, 2017 — the day I now call my Freedom Date — I left.
I did not look back.
I did not go back.
It was the bravest, most terrifying, most necessary thing I have ever done.
"When the heart can't carry it anymore, the body picks it up."
The first weeks after leaving were quiet in a way I had not felt in years. Not peaceful yet — that would take longer — but quiet.
For the first time in a long time, no one was deciding my reality for me. Which meant I had to start learning, again, how to decide for myself.
I started by writing affirmations on my bathroom mirror. Small things. Sentences I needed to hear because no one else had been saying them to me.
You are safe now. You are good. You deserve this.
My children noticed. They watched their mother stand in front of a mirror and try, awkwardly and bravely, to speak life back into herself. So they did what children do — they took the marker and added their own.
I still have that mirror.
I keep it because it was the first time I understood that healing was not just for me. It was for them too. They were watching how I survived. They were learning, in real time, that pain does not get the final word.
That same season, two organizations stepped in when I needed them most. FavorHouse of Northwest Florida met me with counseling, support, and the kind of safety I had not believed was actually available to women like me. Gulf Coast Kids House helped meet the needs of my children during one of the most difficult chapters of their young lives. I will never forget either of them.
And then, that November or December, a friend saw me — exhausted, hypervigilant, beginning to recognize the shape of what PTSD does to a body — and said the words that changed everything:
You should paint. You should draw. It will help you.
So I did.
The first paintings were not for anyone else. They were not for a gallery, a buyer, or a show. They were for me. For my hands. For my survival. For the part of me that had been silent for so long it had almost forgotten how to make a sound.
And little by little, the woman I had been before all of this — and the woman I was becoming — started to meet each other on the canvas.
"Art is not separate from healing.
It is healing."
In 2019, I met Kevin.
I want to be careful here, because this is not a fairy tale and Kevin is not the rescuer of this story. I did the rescuing. I left. I rebuilt. I painted my way back into my own body.
What Kevin did was something different. He showed up — steady, patient, quiet — and stayed.
He met me already on my own two feet. He did not have to save me, because by the time he met me, I had already saved myself.
That same year, my lupus diagnosis deepened. What had started as cutaneous discoid in 2017 was now confirmed as systemic. My body was still carrying what my mind had not yet had time to put down. Kevin met that too — the chronic pain, the flares, the days my hands do not cooperate the way I want them to — without flinching.
In 2023, we got engaged.
On October 18, 2024, we got married.
Today, our family includes eight children. Six I gave birth to. Two bonus daughters Kevin brought with him. All of them ours. All of them loved fiercely. Five are grown now — out in the world, building lives of their own. The three youngest are still home with us, being raised in a house where love is steady, where no one walks on eggshells anymore, where the air does not change when a key hits the lock.
That last part matters.
It matters because I lived a long time inside houses where the air did change. And to walk into a kitchen now and feel the same quiet whether he is here or not — that is not a small thing. That is the thing I did not believe was real.
It is real.
I built it.
I get to live inside of it.
When I sit down to paint now, I begin with the light. Always.
Before there is form or shadow or feeling, there is light — and I lay it down first. Whatever comes after is in service of it. I do not paint figures into being. I find them already there, underneath, waiting to be uncovered.
That is the technique. It is also the truth.
The light comes first. The darkness may cover it, distort it, push against it — but the light is still there underneath.
I paint as the woman who lived all of it. The teenage girl in Jacksonville. The young wife bathing in a backyard with a gallon of water. The mother of small children pretending to be okay. The survivor of a thousand smaller silences. The woman whose Freedom Date is November 3rd — who picked up a brush that December and has been painting ever since. All of them are in every figure I make.
Every painting I make says the same thing in a different language: I am still here. I was not erased. I was not ruined. I was not reduced to what happened to me. I became something more layered, more luminous, and more honest.
That is also why I give back. A portion of proceeds from my work supports FavorHouse of Northwest Florida and Gulf Coast Kids House — the two organizations that stepped in when I needed them most. They are not a marketing line for me. They are the reason I am still standing.
If you have ever sat in your own version of the dark, please hear this from a woman who has been there:
The light was always there.
The darkness never owned it.
And neither did it own me.
If You Need Support
If anything in this story has surfaced something for you, please know — help exists, it is free, and you do not have to explain yourself to use it.
📞 If you are in immediate danger, call 911.
FavorHouse of Northwest Florida
Counseling, shelter, and advocacy for survivors of domestic violence in Northwest Florida.
24-hour hotline: (850) 434-6600
Administrative: (850) 434-1177
Website: favorhouse.org
2001 West Blount Street, Pensacola, FL 32501
Gulf Coast Kids House
Child-focused advocacy and support for children affected by abuse, neglect, and trauma.
Phone: (850) 595-5800
Email: familyadvocate@gulfcoastkidshouse.org
Website: gulfcoastkidshouse.org
3401 N. 12th Avenue, Pensacola, FL 32503
National Domestic Violence Hotline
Free, confidential support 24/7, in 200+ languages.
Call: 1-800-799-7233
Text: "START" to 88788
Website: thehotline.org