what the water gave me

It's 9 pm and I've just completed half a dozen drawings and I'm trying to figure out what the hell just happened. For the past few months, I've been using butcher paper as a drop cloth for the small post-card studies. I looked at it the other day, how the paint worked with the slick translucence, and so I ordered some black vellum on a whim. When I look at these drawings tonight I see the physical manifestation of my dream from the holidays. The scale and proportion of these are spot on, and the translucent surface further pushes the x-ray read of these works. I want to go call my doctor and clip these to his light wall just to see them like that.

The lightening rod moments don't happen often, -for some never, way it goes. But this is different. This, -tonight, is a breakthrough; one I can't fully comprehend at the moment other than the hair on the back of neck is standing up and I'm going to type this and make some more to see if this is really happening. Nothing has ever felt so truly my own before.

I'll have to see in the morning, of course. That's the rub of being a night painter sometimes.

I don't want to stop.

It's as if I fully grasp my medium for the first time; it combines all the aspects of my vernacular as a painter. Drawing has been missing from my practice for too long and I've known it. Drawing is the meat of studio work for us all. You've got to put in the time. I have to see how it dries. It reminds of the early work in copper back in the 90's. How it's evolving and changing on its own after I work it.

and the first big black canvas is staring me in the face, "c'mon, what you got?"