Acrylic on canvas 

30” x 30”

2019

At the start of this piece, I felt very serious and somber, contemplating the ideas of depth and contrast as aesthetically pleasing elements and as dynamic aspects of the uncontrollable characteristics of life. I added layer after layer and all shades of blue, but eventually the creative juices came to a staggering halt.

One of those.

The kind where I added and shifted and took breathers and found resolution in other pieces and still, weeks into its process, I hated everything about it. I just couldn’t crack what it needed. One of those. My husband says when I start talking like that about a piece, he knows I’m moments away from a breakthrough. He reminds me that these kinds of grueling, maddening, make-me-go-crazy processes often yield some of the best paintings. He was right, again.

It was also one of those that I went into with little plan or conceptual thought. This is an example of a painting that let me know its concept during the process, very near to its completion. Now I know that this piece references wading through the depths of our despair or confusion or our struggle to understand our intrinsic value. In the thick of it, it feels like a big, whopping mess. There’s paint everywhere, it seems to only be getting muddier and muddier, and space away doesn’t seem to help. Answers and resolution seem far way and hope that it will be your version of successful or whole seems to be slipping away.

But in the madness, we eventually start to see the smallest glimmer of clarity. When we put less pressure on the resolution, on the end result, we find that the beauty was hiding there in our ability to loosen up and feel our way through the process. When I remembered the sweetness of each playful brushstroke, the excitement in every glistening drip, the wonder in the layers of color, then it all made sense. This painting is process art, not product art.