Why paint?

I’ll update this periodically but for now I hope you enjoy these snippets of my ongoing, seething, decadent, invigorating, teeth-gritting, cardiovascular and soul-shaking relationship with what I am most entangled with in this world: paint, brush, and canvas. 

This is the place where the wall between my truest self and the rest of the world wears thin… 

2023

I twist and curl and feel acid run through me like surges of horses over hills because I am in agony with the desire to compile all of myself and present it. I feel a ceaseless swinging and gripping, for what? Let me be seen. I sense my own pasts twisted up and coiling around everything I think I should know, everything I think I should be. Smothered in some places, can’t breathe in some places, liberated in others, full of breath in others. Some places I am bent and cornered and I am sorry, some places I am traveling in smooth curves over the ridges of universe after universe. I am like a landfill and a garden, both painfully manicured in some of the wrong ways and some of the beautiful ways. I often cannot tell which parts are my truest soul, the soul that is tied to all things, and which parts of me are the mechanistic parts, the ones that have been fed to me and congealed with my originality to form… what? A monster? I am a heaping pile of absolute nonsense but I hunger to know, to solve, to understand.

When the brush is in my hand I am reminded that I am proud of myself for knowing how to run away from that solidity even as I fall to my knees over and over and over again. I still run and run and run towards untamed brambles and sprawling space. What is this guiding force? What is this wildish hunger? It emanates from all of the tiniest particles of everything that ever was. It spills from all of the glimmering oases and all of the oozing junk yards and there is no and never will be any way to separate myself and those places because they all cascade infinitely into and out of me. When I am painting, I am gathering all of those landscapes in my arms and wringing them out, squeezing tiny drops from them that smear onto the canvas and slide down my arms and onto my legs. Before the drops pool at my feet, they carve me into who I am supposed to be. 

Imagine those worlds, those writhing universes that slip and slither untamable and infinite… imagine me grabbing and clawing at them and doing everything I can to love, understand, and hold them until I cannot distinguish between that slithering mess and myself. My paintings are a map of that. 

I came to realize that it was everything. When I painted, I met everything I ever was, all right there, all of it undeniable. All of me, every piece of myself, it was all there in that process. 

Look, what you must understand is that it’s all for the painting. If I am painting for hours on end, obviously it’s for the painting. But you must know that if I am pausing, it is also for the painting. If I find out I need more money and I simply have to work more and paint less so that I can have the stability I need to live, it is also for the painting. The stability is for the painting. The things I need, painting needs them. If I don’t paint, it’s for the painting. Everything is for the painting.

2022

Why do I paint? 

Well I studied the suffering of this world, and the destruction. I studied all of the ways in which this world inflicted pain. And then I felt myself swirling into it, believing that the only machine of this world was one of cruelty. 

So I said oh my god, I have to dig for beauty, I have to scratch at this until I find joy. It cannot be, it cannot be that hatred is most powerful. 

So I dug and dug and cried for joy. I scrambled and itched and clawed and begged for beauty. 

And baby I found it, I found it. 

Okay I have my theories, for the most part, on justice/power/freedom/empathy/right relation, and then I have my paintings themselves. I know they’re connected, but I don’t know how to explain it. The strongest connection between justice/resistance and my paintings is spirit. Spirituality. That connects to anti-capitalism & anti-colonialism and ecology and all that, I could “prove” all that easy peasy. But that’s at the individual level, what does that mean for the interpretation of the work? What does that mean for the intention behind the work and the actual work? Or the way the work is perceived? In other words, I can SAY it means all of these things, but does it actually, does it tangibly mean all of these things? Or… is there still power in it anyways, without saying all of that? Power in beauty, power in awe? Should I settle into that and let everything else follow? How do I grapple with all of the contradictions? Must I understand every contradiction in order to prove my work as worthwhile? As “good” ? 

If I can squeeze beauty from even just the corners of me, then perhaps that beauty can be something for someone else as well. I don’t want that beauty to be just a commodity. I want it to be the type of beauty that comes from a reminder of pain. It is a necessary beauty, one we must actively seek in order to go on. These pieces are about true joy, joy that comes from deep connection. And in a society/culture that thrives on disconnection, we must actively seek joy. Joy from deep connection is wonder/awe, an experience that interrupts. Under these circumstances, beauty becomes power.

Here’s a rough statement that is a work in progress but still valid: (on painting and spirituality)

I would say that since I became a conscious being, or, since I “found myself” or since I decided I want to live, or really since I decided that my existence could be defined by something other than only my pain… I have been searching and longing to connect my perception with my experience, my art with my theory, my body with my thoughts and practice.

To connect my peacebuilding with my art, my morality, my ethics, with my brushstrokes…Is it possible? Will me, the observer, always be separate from me, the feeler? Will my thoughts on love always be separate from the euphoria of embrace? Will my decisions on this mark or that ever make their way into articulated thought, or language? Or will they always only exist in the instinctual/somatic? Will there be a cataclysmic convergence of all of this? My psyche, my body, my theory, my language, the culture… my work? 

Why do I seek that? Why do I wish to blur the divisions, why do I feel that separation is bad? Is THAT life? To work for interconnection, knowing it will only come in flickers and only a handful of times? Or maybe never in full? Is this oneness I seek, is this the search for God?

I’m starting to develop this really fluid and trusting relationship with my paintings. Like, sometimes one part of the painting won’t come to me for WEEKS. And sometimes the whole piece comes together rather quickly. I feel like, “Alright, it’s cool, we’re cool, there’s literally no way I can control this.” It can’t be tied to time and I just have to surrender to that. This piece took me four months, maybe longer. Right now, my paintings aren’t really attached to “this world.” I can’t fit them into money or progress or assignments or deadlines or anything, they just come to me as they come. They don’t have to be ready for anything or anyone, they’re here for themselves, that’s it. So now I’m asking, “What will my paintings be like when I give them total freedom?”

It’s a practice in letting myself be a vessel. I can’t force this type of energy, I can create a healthy habitat for it, but ultimately painting is a flow that comes from outside, from the cosmos or something.

Painting resides deep within me for sure, but it always comes from somewhere else, it always surprises me. Most of the time I’m pretty shocked by what I create. It has never made sense to view painting as something that is born in and delivered straight from me alone. Maybe if it were, I’d be able to control or command it. But I can’t. And now, I finally don’t want to command it. I want it to command me.

I am so ancient and so young at the same time. My paintings are helping me figure it out.

The importance of craft in a factory world.

2021

I’ve been realizing, slowly, that my main foundation is this: I would like my mind to be like a healthy ecosystem, where conflicting notions coexist. I don’t want to be too landscaped. It is only natural for thorns to be sharp and for land to shape and shift with the turn of new species and ideas. Transformation is constant and it is diversity that allows an ecosystem, or a living thing, to survive. So as far as my artwork, multiple ideas will always exist there and sometimes they will conflict.  

It’s very confusing because it feels like I have to do everything I can to fit my paintings into words but they’re not really words at all, it’s like, I don’t know if they really fully exist in language at all, but I have to “market” them. But the whole point of them is that they’re NOT language. They don’t have the same confinements. It’s maybe like… language is this thing that has to be delivered. My paintings just happen.

Why am I still painting? Why am I creating material objects? Because I believe that preciousness can still exist, even in a world drowning in items.

Painting calls me and calls me and I always answer painting’s call. I’ll always answer and always commit and always dance with painting because I know painting and we need each other. We need each other. But if painting ever leaves me and I call and call and I hear no response, I will let painting go so that painting can be free wherever else painting needs to be, because painting has already set me free.

2019

Hello painting, I’ll give you everything I own.

2018

The only thing in this world that comes close to comparing to my painting process is the cardiovascular system. Breath and blood. Many things make it rush, many things smooth it to a calm. There is a rhythm that depends on panic, spite, lust, passion, bliss, cold, warmth. There is an eb, a flow, a stretch of purposes. To me, painting has always been breath, my exhalation of life. 

I tried to get away from painting for a few months, but it’s calling me back, it’s screaming my name and now I’m just laughing at myself.

I hate the, “Oh you must have felt so peaceful after painting this morning. It must be so calming, it must be such an escape from daily life, wow, you must be so cheerful, so happy, such a tranquil person after your little painting session!” A lot of people think I spend countless hours in the studio relaxing, clearing my mind, breathing deeply and experiencing the zen that is life. Sometimes this is true. But sometimes I meet the canvas and I start to paint and slowly I am overcome with heartache. I am sorrow. My heart fills with something, something like pain so deep it rounds through my chest and floods the back of my tongue. Most of the time I'm challenging everything I am. Most of the time I feel like I'm bleeding into my work, pouring my past, my present and my future into different marks that could end up creating a disaster or a masterpiece. Everything is known and unknown in painting and grasping that has never been a breath of fresh air. I would die if I didn't paint because I would not exist, I would fail to address everything about myself.

2017

Sometimes I am freed in glory with my painting. Sometimes painting digs and gnaws at my soul. 

I could drown in my work

I could be alone in my work

I could be in love in my work

I could starve in my work

I could breathe in my work

I could bleed in my work