Featured Piece: The Hill
Sometimes, the art pours out of you. You enter flow instantly and hours (days?) later, voila! Art. The best art you could have ever imagined. It’s a combination of coming up for air after being under water for five seconds too long + arriving at your destination in your car thinking “I have no recollection of one second of this drive”. It's a miracle you didn’t die, by drowning or crash, and you are left feeling invincible. Art is your superpower.
Bustling studio, featuring The Hill
But also sometimes, the art is dried up. You’re thinking too hard and too slow at the same time. You’re too distracted and defeated. Your brain is made of cotton balls and your whole body feels like cement. All there is to do is try and fail. Try and fail, try and fail. Like most things, however, trying and failing leads to a breakthrough, perhaps incredible, perhaps barely perceivable. And then you trudge slowly, steadily uphill until you find your art again.
That is “The Hill”. Like many people, I am prone to expect a lot out of January. I expect my body to instantly reap the benefits of a holiday sugar detox. I expect the 17 boxes of crap I donated/pitched to put a calming dent in my chaotic home. I expect the art to explode out of my nutritionally balanced body in my newly organized studio. But alas, it rarely works out this way.
When I started the The Hill in early 2022, I had no idea what was going to happen when I mixed my first color, which is where I usually start when I don’t know where to start. “What color do I want to paint first?” Hand drawn grid work had been occupying my work lately, so I started a new piece in that vein.
Patrick the Helper
At the time, there was a deeply curiously and endlessly busy 15 month old crawling around my home studio. The grid worked for me because I could almost always commit 360 seconds to choose, mix, and paint one single rectangle. If Patrick needed me, I could finish the task of the small rectangle and support him, feeling both attentive to his needs and accomplished in my work of the single little rectangle. Most times, I could even get six or seven little rectangles. And during nap? Get out of here, rectangles galore! Before long I had 104 multi-colored little rectangles, anchored at the bottom of my painting. When I stepped back, I saw them working so hard to hold each other up. They communicated. They organized and arranged themselves in a steady, harmonious way. Almost heartbreaking, really. Their earnest attempt at making something beautiful WAS what made this painting so beautiful. I didn’t have it in me to ask Patrick to wait any longer for my attention. I also didn’t have it in me to ask those 104 rectangles to take on any more work. No, it was done. All that was left, per usual, was some hot red. Hot red does the heavy lifting. Hot red took it from there. And with that final addition, this one-step-at-a-time painting was complete.
At home, with Jigglypuff and impossible lighting
-SC
P.S.You know what’s funny? I have crystal clear memories of painting certain rectangles. The long hot pink rectangle at the bottom, for example, was painted while listening to “Tusk” by Fleetwood Mac. It means nothing, I just remember it. I remember thinking “I wonder if this song is good live?” I don’t know anything about music.
