sunday ruminations

sunday morning coming down like that song by the Man in Black. there's sunlight and jazz and week-old cigar smoke and paint under the nails and these things rip away the veneer of the week. for all practical purposes, spring has arrived and set up camp. everything is in bloom, my allergies are kicking my ass and tomorrow is a holiday; one to be spent mostly here.

there are hundreds of paintings in this space. no one is calling for them, but I keep making them because i can't stop. rebuffed with every attempt at juried shows I try, I guess I should feel discouraged but somehow I just don't. i feel alive and sure of hand.

four large canvases are on their way from somewhere in New Jersey. they are primed black for me and as such they are grab-and-go; a necessity in the madness of time that is marriage, parenthood, job and life. i've blogged many times about how my practice has become more efficient since the girls arrived. there's an immediacy and urgency to being in here that continues to take my work places it never went before. 2009 felt the year I started over, so perhaps I should cut myself a break for not achieving wild success yet.

I haven't painted with a brush for almost 3 years now and it strikes me that painting is, -at its best, a vernacular, -perhaps a creole. when you encounter something new and truly honest on canvas, it generally is also somewhat foreign, otherworldly. you can't fully understand the language, but you get the feeling. finding your voice and all that I guess.

prepped 12 post card canvases this morning in that brooding tar of mars black. so flat and deep and it feels like swimming in a cave lake in pitch darkness; in other words, liberating.

washes, stains, smears and drips and streaks. paint puddled into pigmented pools becomes alive and reaches out and explores and wanders...to be alive is to be in motion. you might not always perceive the motion if the life is titanic. but mountains stretch and breathe, as do oceans.