the rains are coming

Work is the preferred state of man.  Jobs are socially imposed constructs; they are seldom related to work but instead are directly tied to production and monetary compensation.  There's a reason a hard day's work in the yard, or garage or studio feels different than a day on the job; no matter the job.  It is because work is done for self and for betterment and for purpose and only tangentially for outcome.  The studio is work.  I lose track of time there.  I become immersed in the process of doing and seeing and listening and being when I am in the studio.  Paint.  Putting paint onto surface and taking it off and moving it around and watching it become, fall apart, become again; these are meaningful activities and meaningful purposes.  Art, the product of work, appeals to us precisely because it represents something tangibly different from the lack of truth from our jobs.  Even if, in the capacity of performing one's job some thing is made (more likely produced); it does not hold the life force of that which is wrought from work.

Painting is work.  Bloody knuckles and strained hands and tired eyes from honest labor in the service of the work.  I find it amazing when people from very different walks of life from my own find this quality in my art; I believe in that moment they see the work.

I don't care about illusion.  I never want to disguise that this is support and ground and surface and paint.  I've nothing against my West Coast brothers and sisters with their finish fetish, but it's not for me.  I love the raw, poetic edge of a canvas.  It is the anthropological record; the blood and bone and sinew.  It would be a falsehood for me to attempt to hide it or paint over it.  I inhabit the raw, bloody land of history and enslavement and war and struggle.  The work must breathe with this inhabitation and its ghosts.

The rains are coming.

And there is a cigar and a porch and whiskey as the big drops wash away the blood and sweat and struggle into night.