At age 7, I decided I wanted to commune with birds. I wished to see them up close but avoid frightening them with my human-scale largeness. So I taped leaves all over my body and fashioned a bird feeder using a milk carton and some ribbon, which I dangled from my arm. I stood in our backyard for maybe 20 minutes, as motionless as I could. I even controlled my breath to a suffocating slowness, lest they be watching me and see their perch inhaling. I gave up. I went inside for dinner. After that, my mother began scattering the birdseed on the patio, rationalizing that if she bothered to fill the feeder, they would just scatter seeds all over anyway with their spastic ways of grazing, so she left out the middle man and spread it about on the ground. Really, she had just found a different way of allowing me a more intimate experience with them. Path unpredictably altered. Goal mostly achieved. My life is like that. My art is like that. Thrill and inspiration, followed by bolt of lightening-caliber ideas, trial and error, frustration, and finally, try the hell again.
My life as a painter has been conditioned by these experiences, and softened by intermittent success. I usually love what I paint while in process, then hate it, then try to improve it and ultimately slide defeatedly into “good enough” with my shoulders hunched, arms clasped at my sides, wanting instinctively to curl up in a ball, but remembering I’m a grown-up now and we only hang our heads. Fetal position is for babies.
Upon revisiting the piece in anywhere from 3 to 153.7 sessions of painting and scaling various emotions, I’ll be happy. The process is full of turns and drops. The result is, in most cases, a layering of experiences.
That is my process. For more information, feel free to spend time with my paintings. They’d be more than happy to open themselves to you.