I've been thinking about family lately. I think it's because I'm going to see my daughter for the first time since the Christmas before the Covid pandemic. Almost a year-and-a-half to the date. The pandemic help me realize what's really important to me. Family. I miss both my daughters so much it hurts. But, just like me, when I'm supposed to feel joyous, I feel the opposite. When life bursts forth, I think about losing it.

When I make pieces like these, actually most of my pieces, I have to make pieces first to destroy them. These pieces are about decay (and memory, because what is memory but the shadow of something that is no longer here?) I make a piece, then think to myself that someone comes along and gets rid of it. Maybe it was painted on a wall, like graffiti, or many times I think that was made by someone held in a bedroom or an attic, a shut-in perhaps, with light coming in through one dirty window, with yellowed shades, and dead flies scattered on the window sash, and this person writes their musings on the wall, and whoever it is, their caretaker, comes in and sees it and thinks it's just more lunatic ravings, and they paint it out, but they can never paint it all out. That's what I'm thinking when I make these pieces.

Nothing never ends the way I imagine it: paintings, stories, plays. And that's the fun of it all--the discovery. What you see and learn along the way about the world and yourself and your place in the world. If that doesn't happen, I get bored and stop. (It's the reason I quit acting and starting writing plays and making theater instead; I stopped learning about the world and myself from acting.)

I had an idea for this painting and started it and the painting pretty much said, nope, I don't want to do that, I want to do this. It is exactly like listening to the characters as you write a story. And you can pretty much hear the clunking sound every time when a writer inflicts themselves into the story, where everything goes flat and you're removed from the world of the story.

By listening to your painting you become a better painter. With the painting there is a teacher/student relationship. Don't ever think you know more about painting than the painting.

And if I could explain it in all words I wouldn't have painted it.