How it's happening right now.

My process is always evolving.  Art as exploration, right? For this most recent series, a new process is developing. 

To the left here is where this particular painting began.  I'd been building up layers, playing with textures and so forth like I always do.  Normally, I want to find that breaking point in the piece at which a focal point begins to emerge and then essentially attack that point with attention.  If it survives, the painting is finished.  If not, it gets recycled and continues to grow.  For this series though, I instead allow only the suggestion of a focal point to develop and then I work in my sketchbook for a while to figure out how best to incorporate myself, as a cartoon, into the piece at that point.

This is the first of a series of sketches I did to prepare for the next stage.

This is a detail of the painting after I got myself in there.  I had originally planned to add a bunch of other bits and pieces- props I suppose- like bombs falling and barbed wire, but ultimately decided I preferred the starkness and solitude this little guy invokes on his own.

This is the piece in its entirety.  For the moment, for reference purposes, I'm calling it "Alone on the Battlefield," but frankly, I don't like this as a title and will likely change it.

I think I've successfully shown that frenetic feeling I often get when I'm alone and overwhelmed.   There's too much to do; everything depends on your ability to keep a level head and get shit done, but instead all you can do is shut down and feel guilty while the battle rages around you.

A Weird and Wonderful Life

For years, I had this sense of surreality surrounding me nearly all the time. This idea that I could measure the quality of my existence by its strangeness. I've been missing it for quite ahile, but lately, shit's getting weird again, and it's wonderful. Makes me feel like I'm coming back to myself.

Even when I'm not bringing paint to panel on a regular basis, I'm always painting in my head. Last night was one of those nights that brought everything into a sort of unreal focus. Today I'm home from work with another headache, but smiling anyway.

There's of course lots I need to do in a practical sense to keep things afloat, but that feeling of floating that makes it all worthwhile and it's returning to me.

There may or may not be a picture of me in an upcoming issue of Stuff @ Night with the beautiful Alex Long on our Davis Square excursion last night. Me looking totally pimp and hopefully not quite as drunk as I was. Later on, I spent a couple hours drinking and smoking on some random person's stoop nearby with this totally cute art student and then took a cab back to Central with one of those cabbies that makes you wonder...

Meghan's back at the apartment for the next two weeks or so while she gears up to move into her new place around the corner. Which is no longer awkward. Pretty nice actually. We make great roommates if not lovers.

I've been sketching out ideas for the My Life in a Cage project (about which I'll go into more detail in another, dedicated post), and researching places to make that happen. As much as I'd prefer not to, I may have to give up my sweet studio in Central to make it work. The pieces slowly coming together, reshuffling, etc.

There's a sense lately of a pending rebirth. Like the universe is pregnant with possibilities meant especially for me. And there was something about that art student last night...