Got out of work early and came home to paint

I love peeling back layers of colour with air and rubber

Sometimes when it's slow at work I get the option to come home early.  Tonight was one of those nights so here I came.  Meghan's friend Juliette had come to visit so we chatted a little and then I sort of left them to their conversation to get some painting done.

As usual, I had Pandora playing on the computer in one ear and the radio playing in the other, but additionally, a conversation taking place in my aural periphery.  These sorts of extraneous input I find quite helpful when I need to let go and stop thinking about the work so I can let it happen.
 

I also love stars and fire

I have one of a bunch of upcoming dental appointments tomorrow morning before work so I knew I wouldn't be able to paint or to blog and wanting to do both, did them tonight.  Sometimes I need to remind myself that I can't call myself a painter unless I'm painting.  Other times it's an all-consuming self-flagellation. Sometimes, I just paint and it has nothing whatsoever to do with anything other than the simple fact that I can and there's no other thing I'd rather be doing.  Those are the best times.  Tonight was one of those nights.

I always look at my abstracts as landscapes

I don't have a name yet for this painting, but I think it's about the unknowable nature of whatever it is in this universe that makes it possible for the universe to exist.  Meghan and Juliette and I were discussing the subject just before I turned my chair around to get to work and I think there was some psychic spillage.  I was explaining that I'm working under the assumption that as a hairless ape on a backwater planet I lack the essential capacity required to imagine (let alone actually understand) the sort of force that could be singularly responsible for all creation, and that given this assumption, I find it troubling that I still find myself pondering the basic unanswerable questions.  I mean, if I've really established that whatever the great answers of the universe are my meager simian intellect is utterly insufficient to conceive of them, why even bother trying?  Perhaps it's just a human thing.  Struggle for the sake of struggle?  I'm not sure- I'm just a paint-flinging ape.  Anyway, the painting feels like it's about order from and through chaos, and that may be as close as I'll get in this lifetime to conceiving the face of God.  I'll let you know when I've got a clever name for it.