Every sign of growth and newness brings new hope . . .

Somehow, sometimes, a bad thing can be a good sign. Like the third day following surgery, feeling pretty lousy. So perfectly fits the expected pattern that despite the awfulness of watching my loved one’s pain and exhaustion, it’s oddly reassuring to me. Strange, no? Kind of the way this screwy world can work, with funny, breakable characters like us in it. We see and feel hurt that we dread and yet can find promise in it. We look for the expected outburst of anger or depression, the need to scream vituperation at the gods, and a weird calm descends and what emerges instead is a single blink of zen, that sense that something new and right will come of it all in the end.

Peace conquers all darkness . . .

There was a time when I had a project deadline for a painting and there wasn’t a glimmer of hope that I would finish it in time. A lot was riding on the outcome, and my life outside of the studio was not exactly providing either inspiration or even enough contentment and comfort to help me fake it. So I decided the only alternative was to take my frustration and anger out on the canvas. Since the subject and treatment of the painting were wide open, what better way to find catharsis than in the virtual reality of art.

I’m sure you know where this is headed: I got into the studio late at night, frazzled and feeling pretty desperate and certainly hot under the collar, and planning to take out all of my aggression and madness in making a wild, dark, slashing abstraction that would act as a personal bloodletting, maybe give me a cool high-intensity painting that would start me on a useful new artistic path, and get lots of that pent-up grotesquerie vented. No surprise to anyone that’s ever had the slightest brush with pop psychology, a few hours after I dragged myself into the studio, I produced the most floaty, peaceful, candy-coated painting of ethereal sweetness that I’d ever managed to produce, possibly after as well. Didn’t fire off my moment of impending doom into a monstrous painting; I dealt with my darkness by making a world of safety and joy to swallow it up instead. From grimness, growth. And yes, it became the impetus for a series of idealized abstract landscapes that still remain among my most gentle-spirited works to date.

From the dark earth, newness emerges . . .