Beautiful Destruction

How does a painting start?  What has to align to initiate the spark of creativity? Starting with a blank canvas presents an invitation to create.  I’ll take any canvas, but I prefer to make my own.  Hand stretched canvas feels more visceral, more organic, more unique.  What to paint... 

I had not painted in a while. I got up one day and began going through my oil paints. Gathering the warms and the cool colors and placing them in their areas of the pallet.  Coming up with an idea… Finding the right image... Placing marks on the blank canvas. The feeling of anxiety leaves me as a wave of color washes over the canvas.  Painting allows me to wander off from what's happening in real life. Painting lets me into a world where I lead and follow the energy flow.  When I am stuck I need to find a way to get back into the flow. The divine guidance is persistent with the next inspiration, the next movement, the next color.

Practicing, erasing, drawing, tracing, drawing what you see. 

The unknown work started as a sketch, then further developed into a landscape with a focused red circle. The landscape burst out of the red circle. It was dimensional, like a camera focusing on the image and drawing the camera into the canvas.  I felt like I was done for now, so I left the painting alone. It is difficult, but I have learned to know when the inspiration wains, so I stopped.

When I came back to the canvas, I was feeling like I wanted to add something more to the painting. One wrong move and the image was changed where I could not recover from the last mark made. I made some dramatic strokes and suddenly, a new painting was in the works. I had to take a blob like image and create a form without shape or subject matter; only texture and color and turn it into something magical.  I felt the cross hatching of lines and layers to be balanced, yet still unsettling. I let it rest. I stopped and walked away from the painting.  

I thought about it and left it alone for a week. Only to return with a new image in my mind's eye. I was searching for the next direction. Colorful scribbles are made on the canvas. Symbolic language begins to take shape, forming, becoming something intangible and abstract. Finding structure in the chaos. Coming across “Water Lilies” by Claude Monet I was inspired to glide the paintbrush over the colors creating a new image. I masked the edges to create a frame from the former image. I felt a flowery painterly vibe… I dabbed. I brushed. I blew. I felt uncertain still. I was angered. I felt the care that I put into the incomplete. I felt that I needed to destroy it… for me. 

What is art and what is not art? Creating something from nothing. Creation and destruction both live in this painting, ‘Beautiful’. Beauty is seen from the eye of the creator and has glimmers of destruction in its wake. The feeling of freedom when I plunged the knife into the canvas on the rainy afternoon of March 14th, 2021. The stay-in-place order is now being slowly removed, lifting one tier to the next with the hope of eventually reaching normalcy. Being free from the four walls. Breaking free from the canvas; the painting is slashed by the knife blade as I stab at its layered meaning. My hand punched through the canvas with the Golden Gate Bridge behind me. Raindrops falling on my head as a line of cars formed a circle around me. Onlookers watching with their phones at the ready filming my every move.  

Scarcity is meant to be treasured. The original painting is no longer available. If a painting no longer exists is it still worth anything? What is real and what is digital? Now, It exists only in a digital format of the altered images on the easel. Digital reference points of a tactile physical world. It exists through the cinematography of the captured moments. It exists as a figment of your imagination. It returned back to its original origin of creation. It returned back to blank imagination. The only physical reference to the art work are media files and scraps of canvas ripped from their stretched confection.  

The NFT representation of the artwork in this moment in time is titled ‘Life and Death of Beautiful’.  Life and death are representations of a renewal. Beauty changes and dies, however it can be refreshed by the next beautiful piece that is created to quench the soul. Always looking at what things were, versus what things will be, takes an understanding of the entire cycle.  How does a painting end? Does it fade to irrelevance? ‘Life and Death of Beautiful’ is my attempt to capture this cycle of origin, of direction, of alteration, and absolute destruction. It started as a blank canvas full of possibility, then became a series of visions only to be met by the point of a dagger.  A unique fractured moment in time. Art born and developed, then snatched and destroyed by the creators hand.  Focused on doing what I wanted to do, I ignored them and continued on. Focused on doing what I needed to do, I ignored them and continued on. Focused on doing what I had to do, I destroyed my own creation.

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