#pieceofwork2013

The rain falls because it is so sleepy. It dreams on the way down. 

Driving through west texas we saw epic skies, stars at night, and the little mountains looked like castles in the sky. 

Whenever I don't know how to make sense of the world I'm in, I paint a little world to escape to. 

We visited a farm yesterday in the hills of Pennsylvania that had all manner of furry animals, and I suddenly wanted a black lama of my own. Here he meets a Peregrin Falcon who is nesting on his back.  

The Life Cycle of a Thought:  A thought is a star shooting toward earth, in flight it becomes a bird, then lands on a branch, dives into the river and becomes a fish, which becomes the water which grows into a tree, which births leaves which fall and are swallowed whole by the earth.  

"The Shape of Night" 12" x 16" acrylic on canvas $500 

This piece explores the timeless immensity of love letters, how words can put stars in the sky. To know such love is to know the shape of night, how full it can be, or how empty. 

"I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads — They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river." -Virginia Woolf

This morning I sat looking around my studio and noticed this piece of paper crumpled up on the floor, and I realized how very long it has been since I had crumpled paper on the floor. It's a simple thing, but for me it represents uncertainty, trial and error, and the willingness to throw something out and start over.  For a while now my art-making has been about execution, not exploration. I've embraced the lack of time with a blazing certainty of what I must do and how to do it. But along the way, it has narrowed my possibilities.  This collection is very different from all the rest because of its celebration of uncertainty and the room for possibility, which I So Need right now.  As my life, art and business continue to work in parallel, it's high time for the unknown to be welcome at the table.  With all my other collections, I know exactly what it will be. I have a flash of vision, where I see the entire body of work in my head before I even begin. Then it sits there like a cloud filled with paintings, over my head, and the only way to eliminate the cloud is to create the paintings and that plucks them from the cloud and into the world. I then save the entire collection in order to release them all at once, like one big story. That is the way I have worked ever since my first solo show "Unearthed" in Fall 2010. And each year I have made two collections in that way without fail. Of those 6 collections, comprising over 200 paintings, roughly 6 or 7 of them remain in my possession. The rest are in the hands of collectors... the homes of the world.  As I have gotten to work on this collection titled "Piece of Work", I have surveyed the possibilities that lie before me in my studio and I confess that I have felt overwhelmed by them at times. As I have said before, options are the enemy of happiness. And so it goes with being creative... we often think that more options will give us greater success, and we find the opposite to be true. But this morning, in the shower, I realized that I only need one good idea each day. And after all, I usually have that before noon. The rest is FAITH that the work will follow. I've built enough skill, experience and knowledge to stand on for a season. Now I stand at the foot of the unknown. And though it's uncomfortable, it's where I know I need to be.  This collection is as much a mystery to me as it is to you. So, I hope you will join me in the discovery. And cheer me on through my doubts. And allow for a range of possibility. I know I talk about a lot of different things here on my blog, from Anthropologie to travel to broken hearts and entrepreneurship. But the thing that remains true is that I am an artist at work. And it is so many things. A complicated quilt made of bits and pieces of a life, with no clean lines separating any of it. Thank you for letting me spread them out before us, for sharing in my journey, and for taking the bits and pieces that you need. I hope it is a long time from now, but I hope I die empty... having given each piece of me to someone who needed it.