Watching and Waiting
Until 16 months ago, when Donald Trump said he was running for the Presidency, I never was a political person.
First off, I have to say that until 16 months ago, when Donald Trump said he was running for the Presidency, I never was a political person — never really paid attention to what was going on. This all changed as soon as Trump opened his mouth. I became obsessed with the campaign and thought, like many people, he didn’t have a chance of winning. But he did. Now that he’s actually in office, I’m even more glued to the news, and talk way too much about it. I even got a Sirius radio for my studio so I could listen to CNN and MSNBC all day while I paint. Until this happened, I listened to a Blues station everyday. So when I was asked to do a piece for the series, Drawing in a Time of Fear & Lies, I panicked. Political art has never been what I do.
My art has always come from where I am emotionally in my life. Sometimes what I’m painting about is very clear, like when our 15-year-old dog died. But mostly my work is a combination of abstraction and figuration, and the meaning develops as I’m painting. Sometimes that meaning is apparent as I’m working but often it doesn’t become clear until much later — a year, five years, or 20 years. Sometimes nothing about a painting becomes clear except I know it comes from deep inside, and is honest and real.
An example is this new piece I just completed called “Watching and Waiting.” The painting began with emptying my mind and following scratch marks that I made on a surface. I was very happy with the painting when it was finished but it had no specific meaning for me. However, the longer I looked at it, the more I could see and feel the effect of all that’s going on in the country on the piece. I could see, in the black shape, the anxiety and fear of not knowing what’s going to happen from day to day. I also could see how complex this painting is, with its many different parts all interacting together. I worked hard to create this sense of order in the painting. As a finished piece, it feels integrated and resolved, completely unlike Trump, who is creating chaos everywhere. It might seem like a contradiction to have fear and order existing in the same painting, but those kinds of tensions have always been present in most of my work. This painting holds a particular kind of tension. But I know that next week order and fear might be replaced with anger and turbulent mark-making. These shifts are what make my paintings mine.
