Art doesn’t happen instantly, it takes time, where minutes are not equal in the output, where time goes forward slowly, sometimes too fast, sometimes the days put in mean nothing at all! Art laughs at best laid plans and surprises me with midnight revelations.... Creating has it's own time zone.
I love sharing my process with time lapse videos and photos in the studio, but this doesn't share the whole story. Art takes private reflection, and thought. It unfolds at its own pace. Some artists speed up the process using projectors and/or tracing methods, but I don’t. My process is about watching, observing, effusing myself in the environment that I want to paint, keeping an eye out, an open mind, and letting the painting find me. I sketch, I photograph, I feel. Above all, I feel a place. Then it unfolds in the studio. The idea is delicate, fragile, and requires privacy...me and the idea becoming something else. That’s my process, and no judgement at all on anyone else’s… this is just what works for me.
I prefer this way to any time-savers and projectors because the skill that it takes to create a a painting, by observing, drawing and painting free hand is a valuable one that I have worked on for decades, and I don’t want to lose that valuable skill, it allows me to set up anywhere, anytime... to look at something and paint it on the spot, in my own voice/style. It's the personal interpretation of the artist that gives a painting life. That "looking, feeling and painting" makes my heart flutter every time, it's a tool that I've created and earned, more valuable than anything I could buy. I love my process. Sometimes it requires long periods of time to stew, ideas coming out on not one but many pieces. It's unpredictable and runs by it's own schedule.
So, for the last few months, that is exactly where I’ve been… marinating ideas in my sacred cave of creativity, working on one then another, finding myself surrounded by paintings and working on them all at once. I have just now emerged from that cave of creativity. For everything in this world and imagined, there's a time to daydream, there's a time to create, and there's a time to communicate ideas and share joy.
So, later this week, I will share this brand new collection of paintings that are incredibly special to my heart. (I will be revealing these new paintings first through an email format to my email subscribers, to give them the best space that works for the full collection and then at a later date here and there through the socials.) I hope you can feel in them; the struggle, the victories, the strength, the fragile moments, the love of process, the longing for a place, the longing for a moment swept away by time but remaining in memory... but most of all, my joy in creating.