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.

Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo. Mixed media. 12" x 16" on panel. 2020.

A work in progress.

Self-taught, political painter. Just starting to be able to talk, but unlike my photographs that are steeped in the beauty of Nature, my mixed media is influenced by current events. I'm struggling/wrestling with memory. Narrative. Myths. Fairy stories.

Trump said Covid-19 would magically disappear. Last night Biden optimistically said the country needs to unite (it does!) discounting that 72 million people voted against him and he'll be working with the same people who swore to ensure that President Obama failed, to hell with the country. Our narratives include fairy godmothers, genies in bottles, happy endings. Always happy endings, even if they can be delivered logically. Then we wave a magic wand.

I think I'm sure of one thing: That for the foreseeable future, my work will have dust blown onto it, signifying, harkening Covid-19.

How long did it take you to make it? It looks like something my sixth-grader could do. (Well, at least it's not his three-year-old; that's a step up.) It took weeks. Not weeks of hands-on work, but weeks of thinking, staring, dreaming about it in my sleep. So, I guess you could say, Welcome to my nightmare? No, not really a nightmare at all, but actually a very good memory. The impetus for this piece: I was at college and it was a beautiful spring day in southern Ohio and I was young and my life was ahead of me and I was hanging out with my roommates and friends. It's the time passing, and it's the now, that makes me do what I do; what makes the painting do what it does. You just have to listen and hear and look and see. What does the painting want you to do? And what I hope is that the viewer can see quickly what took me such a long time so see.

Continual work on this singular idea. And I like what I'm seeing. If you like what you're doing, if you like what's happening in front of your eyes, enjoy it. Now is not the time to wonder if anyone else will like it, if it's saleable, what will a gallery think, how much would someone pay for it, or if it fits anywhere in the "canon of American art"? Now is the time to simply give in to your artistic instincts. Have some fun, but it's more than fun; it's using your given talents to do something that you not only enjoy but, well, not everybody will think so, but you think what you're doing is good. That's the best feeling in the world. Once I was a residency and all of these writers were discussing who they thought was a good person to critique their work. (To be fair, they all had just graduated from some pretty prestigious, expensive schools so they didn't know anything else but someone telling them if they were any good or not.) And I'll tell you: An artist might have some trusted friends or peers to give them an opinion, but in the end it's the artist who is in the best position to know if their own work is any good. At the very least, you get a good night's sleep out of it, not tossing and turning, being kept awake by your art demons.

The pandemic gave me the chance to pick up brush and paint again, something I had been longing to do but just couldn't work that into my life, and right now I'm still working small, I think the way our psyches work small, why we aren't born bigger than we are. There are the everyday forces of painting at play. Start small, baby steps, learn to control this size, then you grow. That's what's happening with my painting. One idea is leading to the next, and it's making me happy. I have to say, spreading the paint on the board was very sensual. I'm enjoying working on this painting simply because it feels so good.