If you imagine the studio as a giant sandbox for adults, you can get a sense of what it’s like to work as an artist. There is no greater pleasure to step into the studio with a wild abandon of childish excitement. To allow play to lead you through your thoughts and feelings and help you ultimately come to grips with what it is to be human. Of course, every hour, day, week, month or even sometimes a year is that way. The feeling is so powerful though it draws the artist back again and again for it.
So we as artists use the mindset of our earliest years to communicate more profound and essential truths.
“Your next painting is in the painting you are working on” I always thought Chuck Close said this; however, I am not sure anymore; however, that does not diminish the truth of this statement. The more time I spend in the studio working or simple tinkering as my father would say, the more new perspectives reveal themselves, new connections between imagery and emotions become clearer.
The trick is to be able to reach out and touch that clarity. Of course, for a painter, that horror of watching as every single brush stroke takes the painting farther from the perfect nebulous image in the mind's eye to the rather dull version in the real world, is the reality. Paintings are by their very nature are imperfect objects made of real wood, canvas and coloured mud. It’s the promise of the perfect image that pushes me forward.
“Paintings are never completed; they are only abandoned.” Paul Valéry 1933
This collection is, for the most part, a step into my mind. It holds many ideas and thoughts that will come together to more significant, more concise senses or they are already as far as I will follow the path a particular work has presented.
They are “Pieces from a different puzzle.”
