For the first three months of the year, I was working with materials I already had. This was a good creative constraint because my studio was full of partially finished paintings and I wanted to complete them. Months had elapsed from when I first started the pieces. I tried to pick up where I left off, to remember what had inspired the original idea, but after a few attempts I had to accept that I’d lost the thread.
My creative process is fast and furious. For months I’ll be consumed by a specific color or mark. I paint in bursts and then quickly move onto the next moment or idea. So when I leave a painting untouched for more than three months, I’m usually in a very different creative space when I return. It is almost impossible to come back to a piece after so much time away and to not see it differently.
Do you ever experience this as you’re working through a piece, project or idea?
When that happened earlier this year, I moved into the mental space of re-imagining the paintings instead of doing the impossible work of creative time-travel. Frustration moved to emptiness, and emptiness made space for something new.
These paintings became hybrids or fusions. They are a mix of my different visual languages and, when combined, form a new one. These paintings hold the residue of a few different seasons, moments and hopes. Just when I think I know what I am trying to make, the vision shifts. Creating is so incredibly humbling! The work of this year is to embrace redirection and keep experimenting.
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