Step into the unknown

I’ve written recently about how I’ve been enjoying a daily practice of art work finished in one day; the exploring the creative process by playing and following whatever happens. While I always try to maintain this nonjudgmental mind space, these little “one-a-day” pieces that I am not expecting to turn into anything that would hang on someone’s wall someday give me more freedom.

Some of them have been really beautiful, but when I’m in the major studio and doing my painting again, .trying to continue the “play and followi whatever happens” mindset, I know that I have to surrender to the creative process I have to be able to improvise, and I know I’m not in control that is a stage of not knowing when it’s beautiful it’s invigorating, and I am trying to be a conduit for the creative spirit that connects us all but I also have all my training and all my history of painting behind me and so I’m not just fly flailing around so much as using the expertise that has been developed over the years. Most of the paintings that come out of my major studio with made with oil on canvas or complex, the images are sometimes fairly precise but often you look through layers and that is intentional. I want people to continue to come back to the Painting over years is over many years and to find new things often the paintings seem very simple but there’s a mystery to them. This is also true of the small pieces I’m making on a daily basis very very simple, and yet you can reinterpret and reinterpret as you look at them

With the big paintings I am calling people to sit in a state of unknowing. I’m hoping that this continues as they go back into the regular world that you can. The viewer can appreciate that state of unknowing, I’m hoping that something about the painting resonates with them inexplicably and that there is a mysterious connection that will have a spiritual impact on the viewer. I am discovering in the studio and I’m hoping that the viewer also shares the discovering.

So here are the paintings that I have been in some cases, struggling with because of the state of unknowing that I have been in, not knowing where it was going to not knowing where it would end up, not knowing if it’s any good in many cases, however, I had a sense that was just shy of the knowing that the knowing was going to happen soon that recognition that aha moment that discovery, and sometimes during this process, it came very very late in one case it was when I was taking the photograph of it, thinking that the painting was finished when I took a photograph of it. I had a different way of looking at it and I saw, the painting for the first time

This work is free from self-imposed limitations, scripted plans for what the painting should look like, I am interested in expressing mysteries that are rooted inside the human soul. If I want to express these mysteries, I have to be open and listening at a very deep level.

When you step into the unknown, you are by definition walking away from everything you do “know” or think that you know.

You are becoming like a child. You are putting on the “beginners mind”