Full Circle

In college, I was constantly trying to tell stories with my paintings. I was also drawn to mixed media rather than just single media (collage vs. oil or acrylic or drawing). I didn’t want to be limited by a single palette. Oddly enough, when I finished school, I immediately began working exclusively with either oil or acrylic, depending upon the job. For several years I was working steadily, doing murals, or private commissions, or establishing an online client base with small works that I sold through public auction venues. It earned me a little money and a lot of practice. As a result I can, with full confidence, now say that there’s not much I can’t paint. I don’t question my abilities. That’s a big deal. That’s something for which I am very grateful.

You know what else I learned? I learned that boredom will kill you. No, literally. Turns out that assembly-lining for the sake of money is no way to stoke the creative fires. While I found some inspiration in doing strictly representational work of subjects which interested me, I also found that not telling stories with my work was enough to almost cancel out the joy of the other experiences entirely.

Last year I had some time off. I worked very little. I spent a lot of that time thinking about where I wanted to go with my skill set. I kept coming back to mixed media and to telling stories. I kept coming back to where I began before I got lost in the monetary aspect of it all. I looked over the archives of jpegs I have kept of my work from the past decade. That’s a lot of paintings. The ones that stood out to me where the quirky little detours I’d occasionally take every year or so, where I’d venture down the path of mixed media for the sake of my sanity. And where many of the other paintings (not all, in fact there was much about many of the paintings which were very inspiring and fulfilling), while beautiful, left me feeling cold and distant, those detour paintings made me feel alive, so very much alive. There’s another lesson learned - I have good instincts about myself. I should listen to them.

Early this year I was approached by a couple galleries wanting to see my latest portfolio. Problem is, what I did have was not representative of where I wanted to go. So I asked for some time to put things together and I scrapped everything I was working on and everything I had completed. To put it in perspective, pretend you’ve gotten most of the way through building a house all by yourself from the foundation up, and all you have left to do is to install some bathroom tiles and paint the den, and you say to yourself, “F**k it.” and bulldoze the whole thing to rubble instead.

And you FEEL GOOD doing it.

That was me in a nutshell at the start of the year.

And I started over. From scratch.

A few months ago, while going through the painstaking process of creating an entirely new portfolio of works, I got contacted by a former gallery I’d worked with that was looking for an artist to attempt some interesting mixed media ideas. Would I be interested? Gee, let me think. While my main portfolio in progress was not mixed media, it was highly personal and symbolic. To say yes to this offer was like a gift from the Universe, a way to get back into collage again, to expand my horizons, to play. Oh, to play and play and play. My inner four year old jumped at the chance to do this. So, now here I am working on two portfolios which, combined, complete the circle and bring me back to where I began all those years ago. I am home. It’s wonderful.

(New work to be posted soon on my official art blog and website, just as soon as I finish bulldozing the s**t out of them, too.)