The Process

As a fan of competition and precision, I love games. My favorite of all time being table tennis. Unfortunately, since living in Santa Fe I have yet to find anywhere to spin balls around a table.  You have to be creative to win, be intuitive, you have to imagine what kind of spin is coming at you and counter balance it, there is nothing like running for a shot and making it land on the far corner of your opponent’s side. Its a great fast game, just like the mind works, lightning quick. When you are in the zone you don’t think, just react to sounds and movements. Its fantastic, a game of reactions, its probably the closest you can come to being a cat. 

Fortunately and unfortunately, a lack of playing pong means more time to paint. Now painting does not match the joy of chasing balls around a table, but its pretty close. Paintings  interaction is more of  mind verses space. It is a process of gathering and placing information, it literally is a dance around a rectangle.  It is a game of placement, decisions, and intuitive interactions.  Spin is replaced with color. You don’t win or loose against a painting, you resolve, and in doing so bring some kind of internal energy into physical being. The conclusion is achieved when there is nothing that can be changed with out the internal structure falling apart. Unlike a game, there are false conclusions as there is no outside sources or rules to determine its conclusion. This can only be found through internal knowledge. False conclusions lead to focused decisions. They can be painful but they take you places. Recently I worked on a series of portraits but they took me no where. I thought they were concluded because people told me so. They were not paintings, they were objects to impress. That’s the difficulty of being an artist, every element of your life is transcended through your work, you seek approval through it, that’s where it can get dangerous. Your identity can be challenged by the desire for approval. Its a psychological fucking mess at times, but it is utterly rewarding, to see and experience new forms of beauty, to feel color interact, just to feel, its a good thing. Life would be simpler to just play games, but there would be no false conclusions, and without theses I think that it would get rather boring.