Abstrakt Gaze #4

Fearlessness

When a friend recently said I was “fearless” after seeing a major shift in one of my paintings, 

that set me on an internal journey.

My definition of fearlessness for an artist and a human, being;

Complete surrender surrounded by dense uncertainty.

There comes a moment when our internal gaze informs us

we need to step out of what is,

in search of what is possible.

Resplendent jeopardy of ruination awaits,

yet,

if we cower from the urge-

the abyss of mediocrity is ready to capture our fear,

and transform us into

denizens of the unknown.

Like the Phoenix

we rise from the ashes of our blind leaps –

golden egg in our heart

to place on the altar of creativity.

Other times we must take

those ashes and begin again.

The more often we trust those urges and step out

the easier it becomes to survive the catastrophes.

The magic of what is possible

 is in the fearless leap.

Beginning With Nothing, Ending With Something

What Are You Thinking?

How to describe that feeling- 

the electrical charge of the first stroke 
on the pristine white canvas-

transformation,

suddenly the canvas 

becomes real. 

Beginning with nothing and ending with something,

energy captured 
between the boundaries of the stretcher bars,

it's magic-

the magic of my imagination. 

When someone asks an artist to explain their art, well the difficulty of that sits in the space with no sound - a whisper of creation only the artist hears - a secret language that's not a language at all - a conundrum of communication.

We mine the library of our conscious thoughts in an effort to describe the miracle of our imaginations. 

For the first six months of our lives, we see only through the rods of our black and white world- then one day we blink our eyes open and tadaa our cones have matured and our world becomes the Land of Oz, a kaleidoscope of hues.

What did our six month-old selves think?

We had no alphabet to bridge the sense of sight with the nebula of thought - 
objects were simple color fields,
we hadn't learned the art of naming things,
so how did we think? 
without words?

That's art and what I believe Picasso meant when he said, "I want to paint like a child." Which is why that five minute elevator speech is so damn hard to write.