Making Room for Art in a Crowded World

I am thinking about my art... yearning to saturate myself in it over the next week when I take time off my day job...

I came to art incrementally and somewhat later in life than other artists. When I think about why I paint, I find that I cannot explain it better than Thomas Merton(American and Trappist Monk at Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey in Trappist, Kentucky, 1915-1968) when he said "Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time."

And so it is for me: an escape and an exploration at the same time. An exploration through the choices I make, as an artist, every step of the way: what subject? what point of view? what colors, what edges? and then, I get to why? Why do I choose to paint what I paint? and on and on.

I love to paint animals - I love what I see when I get into those paintings: the sentience, the soul, unobscured by pretence... when I paint still life (for me the best way to paint from life), I almost always include some living thing, such as a bird or a mouse. It feels more alive to me that way, provokes more of a story. When I paint pet portraits, of course, I paint mostly from photographs. When I paint these still life compositions, though, I often rely on taxidermy specimens I have gathered over the years for just this purpose... allowing me to truly paint what I see, in the same light with the rest of the arrangement. Currently on my Facebook "Artworks" page: a still life of a crow, painted from "life" from a taxidermy specimen I got from a museum in Elmyra, NY, and which was sold to a couple in Washington state.

I also like to paint people: portraits and genre scenes... because for me, it is the feeling and the implied story that is compelling in the first place... the decisions about how to depict that story then create the painting.

I am pretty old now (middle aged - I won't fess up to particulars), and yet I am learning more about who I am and what is important to me today, through my painting, than I have throughout my earlier life.

All told, art is a losing proposition for me: I lose my inhibitions, all sense of time and all my obsessive worries...aaah!