Aesthetic Arrest

Two new paintings in their first draft, each are currently 4' x 8' but anything can happen still

Holy-Be-Jesus its been a while!!!

Alas, my studio is heated and this week I began again.  (When I die my story may be titled 'The always beginning story' rather then the never ending story! How many times do I begin again?)

These past months I have been driving through the changing seasons and absorbing the nuances of the cycle.  Now we have arrived at the death-beige ground with wet black tree smudges and strikes and cold lavender skies.  I want to paint.  I want to paint beauty for beauty.

I began.

I marveled at the gushing movement of myself and the paint, watching its tricks.  After my first layers I was overcome by emotion.  Pure emotion gushing out of me in tears and laughter, what would best be described as hysteria, if you we're there, I looked as you can imagine, like a crazy-pants-artist...it just came out and out and then passed through.  Creative energy is powerful and intense. It feels good to give myself the opening again, the sacred place of a studio, the painting to hold it.....

Painting is so different then making objects or things, at least it is to me.  My painting is a physical dance with a material that can become anything, I want it to be everything at once and nothing more then paint at the same time.  Looking at my beginning paintings I thought: "How about a tree, an outline, a place, a person, a meaning, a story, an idea, all of these and nothing."  When it has all of that and still is nothing more then materials, materials that stop you in aesthetic arrest because they are beautiful, that's when it is complete.  Its such an intense journey because you do not know what it looks like until you are there.  It is a humbling process.  For myself, painting is not trying to prove something, show something, or educate someone, I am there to discover something.