1.Writing about my art should come naturally, right? I mean, If I look outside of myself and listen to the advice that’s given. Yet it’s the hardest thing for me to do. I make. I’m a maker of things. I make these things as a way of life. I have no choice. If I cannot make - then what is the point of it all.
2. I paint because words cannot hold the gravity of what i’m trying to express in that given moment. When painting becomes obsolete I express myself through sculpture and when that is not dense, hot, heavy and uncomfortable enough I work in film. Mostly found footage. Something with a past, with history, with a language of its own.
3. This is my 2nd language or maybe my first. Creating—I can see that as my first language, since before I could talk I was creating memories and finding out how to be human. Discovering water dripping from a faucet, looking at the trees before language told me what they were. Seeing the beauty all around. Colors and faces before I even knew that I had a face of my own. All of that to say creation and creating is my first language.
4. If I could articulate what I make any better maybe I would have been a writer.
5. I melt into the canvas with the watercolor, I allow the materials to use me. I disappear. It’s like a dance, a waltz, a tango, a rumba over every area of the wall of my mind and my studio is the only space in my life where I welcome chaos and confusion. I breathe it all in and paint it all out. I supposed I could look at words as lines, formed into shapes and inked up the page. I still need more expression, less control and more room for error. I need to fight with the confusion that is happening with the materials. I need more to rectify and clean up. To submit. Less delete button, more “Oh Shit”.
6. I rolled out the red carpet for making. Make everything nice. Sweep the floors, dust the baseboards, wash my brushes and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I let the paint stiffen until the brushes are ruined. Money wasted. And then I punish myself with all kinds of thoughts about how neglectful and wasteful I am and can be.
7. I order more brushes. I say this time it will be different. This time I will be better. This is my craft, and extension of me.
8. My voice.
9. The loudest, richest and most honest voice I can use.
10. My most authentic voice. So I will be better, to me, to my voice, to my craft. I love my new set of brushes. I clean them. We make beautiful things together. Some might argue that we make disturbing, unsettling and haunting things.
11. This all translates beauty to me. That is what my brain hears. It is not my aim to drown the viewer in hopelessness and dreary paintings. We have the news for that. I do not go into the studio with the intention to paint sadness.
12. I distort memories..
13. I change the shape, scale, size and being of a person, place or thing.
14. I re-write history, my may. And sometimes, most times - it ain’t pretty. I go places where there is no light. Sometimes. Other times I want the viewer to go so far into their head that they forget that I brought them there.
15. Would you agree that real change comes from discomfort?
16. Are you able to grow and transform your environment if there is no challenge? Does your judgment keep you safe? Keep you from knowing that there is a better life waiting for you ... attached to that thing you find intolerable.
17. Suffer a little less today. You have the power to do that. You control your environment and call into it what you want, when you want it.
18. What number do you use? You know, to make the call. Who or what eases your suffering?
19. Me?! I go to the studio. Life it in, paint it out.
20. Wash, rinse and repeat step 7.