On Painting

My passion in art is human connection. Reading Jason Stopa's recent article "the Line is A Circle: Painting Is A Circle" reawakened a passion for painting that has been somewhat dormant in me. For awhile now I've struggled with why I paint, what I paint, and if I can call myself a "real artist" because I don't feel myself fitting in with what I see and read about in the art world. 

I don't know why it took someone else's words to clean the glass that I've been trying to look through, but it did. So thank you for that, Jason Stopa as well as Mary Addison Hackett who shared the article on FB, spurring me to read it in the first place.

Ever since college I've known I didn't really fit in with the contemporary art scene because "painting was dead"- an art form that only the severly outdated would use. But painting was my first love. 

So I kept at it. Over time though I felt like what I was doing wasn't disaffected enough, cryptic enough, or edgy enough. Through the years I lost my way, or more truly I lost my Why. Since painting the way I did -based on intuition and emotion - did not itself seem valid, I tried to alter my work but as I did I grew less and less happy with it. Less connected with why I was making it, and thus making it lost priority in my life. 

In the most recent years I moved more towards creating craft based projects because I couldn't reconcile where I was at with painting. I enjoy creative diversity; reaching outside my painter's box and into a much broader range of materials was great. But I missed losing myself in painting. 

So today, I want to let all those hang ups go. I want to paint something that makes my heart beat and eventually I'll put it out there into the world believing that someone will understand my language, and that however briefly their heart will beat to the same sensitivity, too.