I made the painting above "New Gold Dream" this past November, it's part of a series I started in April of 2012. I had never before made anything remotely like this. I'm going to try and describe how it came about.
The drawing above, from 2007 is probably the closest thing I had made to these current "wooden room" paintings. The way the current paintings came about is that My friend Mark Krayenhoff was describing these drawings as being very kooky and having all kinds of crazy patterns clashing against each other so I went and looked at them and this is what I found, I couldnt find anything like what Mark was describing so I decided to try making some.
Here's what I came up with, a drawing "Other Voices" that I gave to Mark for his birthday last March.
I wanted to see what this would look like as a painting so I tried and came up with this....
...pretty good, but not great. It was very exciting to make though as I'd never really made anything like it before.
I tried again and came up with this......
I felt the thrill of having made something unlike anything I had ever made before. I took risks and challenged myself and I ran with it, I spent the next 9 months exploring all the dark cobweb filled alleyways I could find.
We know when we are going through the motions and we know when we are really going out on a limb and challenging ourselves. I look at it as one of the great perks of our job, that we get to challenge ourselves, when its just getting repetitive and we know what the end product is going to look like we do it a different way, try something new and that thrill when we've created the thing we never even envisioned and that no one has ever seen before, thats what makes life worth living, and that's what makes me supremely grateful that I get to be an artist.
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