Let Me Tell You a Secret: I Do Something that Many Artists Scorn

Let me tell you a secret. I do something that many artists scorn. I don't make art "just for myself."

Plenty of artists declare the opposite, and they mean it. For them, it's one hundred percent, "I make art just for me." The possibility of a person viewing a finished work is an afterthought, maybe even an intrusion.

I understand that instinct. The process itself is intensely rewarding for me too. It's where I work through hard things. It's how I document my life as it moves. When I'm in my studio, I'm not thinking about who's watching or what they'll think. My mind stays open, unguarded, unmoved by anyone else's opinion. Private. That part is wholly mine. And I'm entirely absorbed by it.

But I don't feel like a painting is finished just because I put the brushes away. It's finished when someone else sees it. Once a painting is out in the world, things happen that have nothing to do with me. You look at it and you may or may not like it, but my hope is that something from your own life connects. A feeling, a flash of joy, grief, calm, anger, a childhood memory, hope, doubt. Whatever you feel. You move through the colors and forms and physicality, and it finds you.

Judge it however you want. Call it strong or weak, good or bad. That's fine. I hope you'll be kind and I'm always working to let go of the sometimes overwhelming fears and insecurities that come with exposure. We all have them. Because truly, what matters more to me is the exchange itself.

My hands painted it. My heart and mind shaped it. But your experience with it is what completes it. That's the melding of minds. Not a metaphor. It’s two separate lives, touching through a piece of canvas and some pigment. Wow. I think that's a strange and remarkable thing. How could it ever be ordinary? I make something. You fill it with meaning I never could have predicted and couldn't take credit for even if I tried. Even if you detest it. When something I made meets something in you, that's not my doing. That's closer to otherworldly. A small miracle, repeated, painting by painting, viewer by viewer. I never take that for granted.

I don't say this to make my work sound more important than it is. I say it because I think it's the deeper truth about what art actually does, mine or anyone's. The making is private. The viewing is connection. Being part of that mysterious give-and-take is not a small thing to me. It's an honor. And another reason to go back into the studio.

See my available work HERE