breath into water

Hot thick air and silent Main St. outside the door; ashes and droplets of Mars black stain and seep into the 100-year-old wood, like sweat, like breath into water.  You're with me here.  You always have been.  I found the personal and through it discovered the universal.  So these paintings are your poems and stories and struggles and hopes.  They belong to us all, and perhaps least to me once the paint dries.

I don't remember the struggles aside from they happened is all.  This time is fleeting and immediate and I am only passing through it like the cities and towns I've passed through my whole life.  I once told a lover that leaving is simply what I do; no less love, only the constant longing to wander beyond and through and on and on and on.  That's in the paintings now.  That's in the blackness and shadow.  The paint on my shoes keeps my feet on the ground, constant and steadfast.  I can put that longing someplace physical and go back home.

I moved into this space and started a blog about the journey from obscurity.  I always said if I found the answers I would share them for free, but now I don't know.  My willingness hasn't changed, it's just that I don't think anyone would listen.  If I told you it was easy, you would dismiss it.  If I told you it involved pain and personal sacrifice, you'd ask if there were another way.  There's not; either way, that is, another way.

I wanted to row out to the vastness and the unknown where it's dark and desolate and sky meets sea and somehow find something beyond, and then somehow -inexplicably, find my way back.  Only then could I give it away.  Maybe I'm close now, but whether I'm returning or continuing to row out doesn't seem to matter much any more.

There's a stillness to the studio when I'm about to begin a painting.  Sensual and slow and steeped in loss of self.  Things become enhanced, that's the only way to describe it.  So much of it is labor; the building and the priming and the base coats over and over.  Divine labor, heroic at times, but labor nonetheless.  Then that first mark.  Paint on surface and choice and negation and choice and option and over and over and it is forged and carved out of the nothingness.