Images and Thoughts

               Having the audacity to integrate and experiment with intersecting modes is essential—or if not the audacity, then the play, or if not the play, then the amnesia. 

Throughout periods of painting I’ve gathered experience with concerns (joys) of process. I always have a bit of the switch mentality that seems to be a very common sort of disease/blessing of members of my generation. It’s that ‘I’ve been told I can do anything, and I like ____ & ____ & ____. They all seem equal in terms of ‘value’, even if they are different, I may be more talented or naturally inclined towards one or another, but which one seems the most ‘rewarding’ or ‘worthwhile’ or simply intriguing enough to provoke me to believe in it is quite inconsistent. What stays consistent is the stress to make, the necessity of it in certain situations of life locked away from the world. If total freedom is impossible then at least it is possible to steal away with a small piece of the world and animate it with imagination. So the difficulty arises of going to bed when nothing has been made to dance in a locked up world.

                By integrated, I mean… a collaboration of mediums, a painting with writing and photography, if I were to fill in those three blanks immediately. But when considering a combination of those things, entirely other mediums suggest themselves: game design, film. And yet by integrated I mean not just a collaboration, but a synthesis into an object/book/work that is somehow knit together better than something like ‘this is an illustration of this’ or ‘poems and splatters’. The things I’ve learned about process need to cross between the collaborating mediums. Watercolor is powerfully portable, so is writing and photography. 

With watercolor I have a new opportunity to experiment with a process… that isn’t in a locked up world. This is like breaking down a wall that has defined my life. The thread of process leads to ideas like this, places like this, and it just looks up at you from the dust, like ‘are you coming with me?’ In the extremes, it’s heartbreaking to feel the answer ‘no’ simmer up in the back of your mind, and paralyzing to imagine the consequences of saying ‘yes’.  Often the middle way of stretching yourself between curiosity and the inclinations of security is a trudging wormy way, a compromise that still reveals glimmers of exciting change. But all wriggling does lead somewhere, even if it’s just deeper in the mud. There are things down there.