15 minutes

And so it happened. Or at least I thought it happened. I woke up with a vigor and raced to the sticky canvas and retrieved a brush from a pool of Gamsol, and tried desperately to breathe life into the hog hair filbert brush by drowning it with a cadmium red and sap green mixture. Two strokes and re-load the brush I kept telling myself. Keep the surface fresh. Keep moving on to new expanses of neglected space and refrain from creating mud or dull color. Then it dawned on me. Art is very much a story of my day to day life. The more I paint, I’m finding, the more life makes sense to me. Am I insane? Yes, but that is beside the point. I am discovering the secrets of life through painting. I am becoming the very thing I used to dismiss as empty rhetoric during my Academy and Undergrad years. I recently entertained the idea of reigniting a flame with an old flame (yes she was hot), and was fascinated by how much we had grown apart. We went back and talked about what worked, and what didn’t work. As the conversation went on I became impatient and disinterested to the point of seriously considering literally standing up and walking away from her. As I sat in front of the incomplete canvas I realized the minute I decide to over occupy an area I’d be creating mud, thus sucking the life out the color and ultimately sucking the life out of the image.


Mud can destroy the color and vibrancy of a great painting, just as mud can destroy a vivacious life, by going back to stroke (pun intended) an area one feels the need to go back to. What mud meant in many paintings I’ve produced was an uncertainty and a lack of confidence to move on to another space within the painting. At the moment I am in search of being able to make a decision, and live with it. I realized I made a decision to end a relationship and wasn’t ready to live it as evidenced by my going back to stroke the canvas of my old flame (yes she was that hot). In the practice of art the most difficult aspect of the practice is making decisions. Deciding to be a fulltime professional artist is a decision that can get muddy when one finds themselves having to not pursue it fully without looking back. I look back on my time at the Academy today knowing the class that graduated with me decided art and didn’t look back for two years. Few of those artists have looked back and have since left the practice behind them. At some point in my life after the academy I had to make this decision of going back to school for a back up plan or staying the course and being a fine artist. I am sure I made the right decision and will not look back. I took a stretch and walked away from the painting with my back turned towards the canvas, taking a long pause to adjust my eyes on my wonderful printed T-shirt collection. I turned around to critique the 15 minutes worth of painting I had done while making these mental epiphanies. I was satisfied with the decisions I made and was not going to go back………No seriously I didn’t go back into the studio at all. 15 minutes was enough painting for the day. Remember delayed gratification!