The doubt which proceeds achievement

So often I don't know. I recently looked through my previously produced books of work and then I look around me now at all these works drying on the floor like crazy tiles. I put one on the wall, I look at it...try to see it, walk away, come back, sit down, look again...and again. What is this work about? What is it, exactly, that I am doing here? Words like "like" or "good" seem irrelevant to the conversation, much less the Conversation.

I'm close. I can feel it, and I know the resistance which rushes toward me in its myriad familiar forms is an open wound on the self-limiting dragon which holds me prisoner. The things which hold me back are mortal, they can be overcome, and I see this now. Yet, I don't know what is missing in front of me. I don't know how much further to push out from what I see.

Then the ringing thunder, "I suck!" echoes in my head.

Still, I show up. I am here, I am listening and watching and moving and my hands and wrists and elbows are covered and splattered and dripping with paint and I know, I am absolutely convinced, this is for some purpose beyond for its own sake. I'm alive and making work at this moment in time because it is the moment in time I was made to make work about. The pervasive anxiety, the collective need for the visceral experience, and the light shown into the spaces between the lines of delineation and comfortable understanding.

It lacks, but what?

More paint. Bigger surface coverage, which may mean making my own application tools. I saw it making my daughters' sandwiches the other day...the way the dull blade spread the thick, gooey substance, and I thought, -just at that moment, that I saw the pictorial space.

I saw the fractals in the stairwell of the lighthouse and conch shells and waves of surf surrounding me as I left the shore. I swam into the horizon, searching for the tangible nothingness which would show me what lies beneath the world in which we so blindly trust. It was there, and I'm trying to find it in the paintings right now in this warehouse along the train tracks. It requires leaving things behind, because I have be light for the journey. I have to come back and recall it by memory.

The other voice drowns out the previous, this one simply and quietly saying, "do the work." Do the work, the rest will come.