The biggest part of art is thinking.
Images pop into my mind all the time. Images of childhood trauma (though thankfully, those are fading with therapy and time), images of my day and my loves. Sometimes one seems very strong and I know I'll paint it.
But why?
I think some artists paint the images that enter their mind and find the meaning in the image itself. Or, in what I think is a similar process, they find the image on the canvas as they manipulate color and design.
I do that a little, but ideas for me trump images. Why am I attracted to this over that? Is there some life metaphor that it illustrates?
The answer is always yes. Maybe the yes comes after-the-fact, maybe my life metaphors are so strong they hijack anything neutral to their ends.
But that's the point, isn't it? And that point itself is where I want to concentrate in the next pieces. As a human, I carry with me a particular set of ways of making sense of what is essentially a neutral set of quarks and forces surrounding me. That I choose to call them butterflies or betrayal or disease or delight is because of my storytelling, my ability to make metaphor. How does that process work? I don't know. I have been trying to sabotage it to see what happens in the breaking of it, hence my recent watercolor series. And I've been trying to create it to see what happens in the making of it, hence the paintings that border on illustration.
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