Reactions

There are lives lived less than the life of a single painting, I suppose

I have received some emails about my latest work, Soft I, that read like frenzied prayers for exorcisms. I guess I've brought forth a ghost; I guess it's the risk of painting people, and in the Internet age, these winst ghost people travel at the speed of light.

First and foremost, thank you. Sometimes I forget the perceived miracle of my medium, I only play with puppet strings while you watch a story unfold. But behind the stage I improvise to your guiding rhythm, and it keeps going, and it keeps going... and I would be incurably paralyzed without it.

There is so much magic –

I want to show you where I live

If you look carefully you may catch a glimpse of me...

It's easier to understand me if you don't take me seriously

:)

Soft

Soft I 30" x 40" acrylic on canvas

It's an elementary observation that I desperately needed to make:
To preface, there are things about me that make things about others enviable:
I fetishize the communicative abilities of others
I round off their corners, I sand down my own, I lose almost the whole of myself
And fade into a sculpted landscape of white pebbles, mowed lawns, sidewalk-stunted trees

The worst is, I resist even in painting, I've been depicting the round-about;

time to expose myself.

It took an hour and two months to get here: an hour to trace back two months of navigating the overgrowth. I'm very happy to come upon a clearing, these are new thorns in my side, I've got a compass now, I'll cover new ground, I won't redouble.

As banal as rainbow after rain

I'm imagining a neurosis, under my breath "[point] nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine..." waiting for an unconscious .000001 to interject and bring me to the next second-of-rest plateau. Two months of holed-up experimentation, overwhelmed by doubt, enshrouded in a week of Berlin rain. It's dark in here!

Sita Sings the Blues livened me up a bit today, I laughed out loud five times and I never laugh out loud, and then and then she sang, "If you want the rainbow, you must have the rain," with those big lashy eyes and I Almost doubled over 'cause the cliche hit me so hard (I think I've witnessed true alchemy, from ennui to poésie)

Clutter clutter clutter, it's hard to identify what is and what isn't, so I'm haphazardly shredding it all, including what I paint, how I paint it, and what I'm painting it on.

Funny, I'm compensating with way over-eating [foodstuffs], so here I am in front of my computer setting up Google reader, feasting my eyes instead on an all you can eat buffet of information. I'm trusting that it's a shared stomach - the one for food and the one for information, cause satiation just by the former is foul.

Clutter clutter clutter and I've been eating it too, when you eat it you poop it when you see it you paint it, I'm like a clutter robot with redundant coding, I'm like a human with hope.

Hold in there, I'm starting almost anew, I can't be too focused on sorting and eating and trashing and amassing but I definitely needed to pump the stomach and clean out the eyes, so that from this point on I can differentiate between intuition and compulsion, maybe ask a few more rhetoric Why's.

I live by a teacup prophecy

I give most others the benefit of the doubt, you are wonderful you know so much how do you do it oh will I ever catch up, and the somethings I glance in hot pursuit seem to mock me, "Panting face jiggle cheek stomp stomp boy you aren't enough!"

I think it hurts, even though I laughpant it off.

They're right, through the telephone chain of ear to brain I hear to myself: I've always sought the easy way out, there is no way out, the answer, instead, to the way in, work work work; the question, why; the product, fuck, mostly lame!

See, though, I do strive for perfection, which makes me a lazy perfectionist, because I expect a lot from relatively little and end up quite angry with myself and enamored with the rest of the productive world. There are times… when my logic lines up with my intuition and for a brief moment I think in completed (!!! bad sign already) images, i.e. I fantasize about my place in the world. These moments are beautiful rare and absurd, even more rare as I become even more aware of my irresolvable ignorance, and the author inside me loses another hair, chips a tooth, stubs his toe on a toilet bowl.

Little absurd dictator inside me, hi, I give you full authority because you look funny and by the way you hobwalk I can tell your mind leaps and bounds, I'm a good shell, tug me by the ears and I'll comb my hair, I don't know a damned thing so let's work together like double-team-trouble, two crazy heads who never alone claim to fame can, subversively, absurdly, change the world

where I'm where I am

I took command again of my super veiny hands and grabbed and go, and what came was just for fun, for me, and I'm digging it

broken spoken

I don't care what words, sometimes I just want to be a man of many

In a new city (in new cities) I am new conversing every night, I don't have that much to say, I feel cliche, I feel stupid often, I am mesmerized by people and how much they know

Tomorrow I will shut up shut down and read