(BIG SMILE)

back on my good grey horse this morning. already already.

it's funny how quickly perspectives shift.

yesterday, a miraculous thing happened: i began a new oil painting. something about priming and sanding and smoothing new canvas made me hungry for it... to revere something. and oil painting is a very reverential thing- the history of portrait painting bleeding through... no matter the subject... it's always a portrait... and they say, in some way, always a self-portrait. i tend to agree with that. all work is, to some degree, autobiographical. even if only in terms of aesthetics. and this is a perfect way to perceive it. a perfect way to proceed. why work on something you're not at all attracted to? that doesn't speak to you? why spend hours deep in the wrestling if you aren't captivated by the image itself?

and this outlook i've given myself permission to cling to - of recognizing, day by day, what image or form or material speaks loudest to me - has unleashed such a rapid love. a quick-moving, diligent, reverential love. and so i slid the black oil all over and kept going, kept going, kept going. and i realized that maybe the thing that has been bugging me specifically about oil painting isn't the material and isn't the image, but rather my handling of it. specifically, my technique. it needed to change a bit. evolve. i had locked myself in to a procedure.

but all the drawing i've been doing has refreshed me... let me see images in a different way... let me see materials in a different way. how painting is an act of honoring. a mode through which we (i) esteem something. and drawing can be that way too, but it's more intimate... full of traces and stains and the sweep of the human hand throughout its entirety. if you look close enough, you will find a finger print. and that's why i am so attracted to drawing lately. the intimacy of it. the imperfections and explorations that are inherent to the media itself.

but yesterday, something shook loose and i remembered that i do in fact know how to paint. that i know how to paint wet-into-wet. that i don't have to stick to the procedure if the procedure no longer aids the exploration as a whole. it was a fast, hard, happy realization and i worked late in to the evening.

it's funny... the things a person forgets. and how frail my ego gets some days. days when i say the worst things possible to myself, convinced everything i've ever done is stupid and pointless and that i'll never get it right. haha! all artists do it. and it feels like hell at the time. but i have to laugh at myself and just keep going.

it is bright and beautiful and green green green outside. maybe i'll paint outdoors today in the good light.

i'll be back later with the poem of the day. i'm enjoying just thinking about painting right now and want to sit with my coffee and look at the canvas for awhile this morning before anything else. it's romantic. :)