Painting is My Life

There are a few different types of work that I do. Painting is my life, not in some lofty way, just that its what I do. It is the bulk of what I spend my time on fo;r over a decade, so it very much my life, day to day. Most of us eat periodically too, and we don’t tend to eat the same thing again and again, so when I am painting I dont like to do the same thing over and over again. I have a subject matter side, a capture of interesting scenery, objects, perspectives both mental and visual. When I think of how much things have changed in the last few years, and how the earth is changing around us I feel a subtle disquiet, an unease. So a bit of this is perhaps cataloguing things as they change, and through painting recording how I feel about what I am seeing in conjunction with the image itself.

The other side of my art is more subconscious, originating from vivid sleep, good or bad, tangential thinking, and stream of consciousness / daydreaming. I hesitate to talk for my art especially these pieces, because that is the expression. My words can not adequately convey what my paintings are already trying to tell you. These thoughts very rarely take any sort of narrative shape, but rather tend to meander, and spiral. An author I enjoy once compared writing to a form of telepathy, for his thoughts were now being spoken in your head exactly as he intended. Art is in my mind much the same. I am trying to allow my thoughts to flow into your head briefly, I am trying to have a dialogue with you, and my work is what I have to say. There is I think most of us can agree, an awful lot to talk about.

Keeping these two modes of work is something I have fought in the past, thinking that I needed to find a "voice" but in the end no one speaks in the same manner, the same tone, cadence, or zeal all the time, just as no one eats the same thing for their entire life day in and day out, no one breaths the same all day and night. Painting is my life, so I live it in a myriad of ways.