

At first glance, one might not see all the colors but with a closer look and some time the sage green starts to come, the lavender, the iridescent hazelnut. My intention with the new paintings is to dial down all sound, to reduce the visual input to a combination that has to intentionally be explored. I’m not sure if it is an oversized doughnut or the more surreal experience of shifting size to allow envelopment within a classic sized doughnut probably the latter. I’ve had an okay number of doughnuts in my life and the new paintings that explore about thirty-five blended shades of neutral colors and metallics feel exactly like I would imagine climbing into a doughnut might feel. One of the ways I choose to describe the new art is that it feels like climbing into a doughnut. When there is a loss of sense of control it can be surmised the only thing left we can control is how we respond to things, how we position our lives to respond to others and how we choose to carry out our own routines, including our thoughts. So I guess i could say that the chaos, the worry, the heartbreaking misfortune of many has caused me, as an artist, to calm where I could I found that reducing any of the chaos where possible even if those details seemed insignificant added up to make changes in my life and in the lives I am in contact with whether in daily or occasional. As within so without, as without so within. I look up now and that list which took nearly two years to accomplish has made a tangible change in my surroundings. My quickly accomplished and discarded written lists sometimes kept my mind off the unwritten list of things that were most worrisome and bothersome to me as I chose to handle the aftermath of several years of being too busy. I wish I had kept a written list but I didn’t. There was no normal in 2020 and in the unscheduled time that lent itself to the brief consolation of daydrinking that was thankfully brief and not lasting and I had an intentional shift to the accomplishment of tasks.

It has spiked from time to time … but the ebb and flow changed to a different cadence. Creativity speaks through the essence and at times that connection has seemed clouded. I pray the writing muse comes today because writing has not had my creative attention like in the past and it has sometimes been a challenge to see through the collective grief of two years and into the eyes of creativity. This is a story about how most of my art started to look like my cat.
