A Big Squeeze

I don’t hug my canvases, but a frame as big as me could make me look like I do. I sometimes move them from place to place, not thinking as much, but believing this would shift something in my insides, you know, the gut. I’ve listened to two voices in my head while I’m painting, both missionaries, pushing me to have faith in my learned experience of color handling and hand-eye coordination. Whether I choose to make a mass more representational does not change the process at all. My palette is a drunken romantic convincing me of its rationale, and at most, I paint with its uncertainty, the same uncertainty we (me) see anyway with language, people, objects, and places that have been peopled. In that case, do I embrace what I paint?

Growth of the Soil

I'm reading Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun. I notice the calluses where my fingers leave my palms. There's a part about potatoes being indifferent to man-made categories. They could be boiled with salt, stuffed as pre-wedding partitives, or mashed in soup kitchens. After that, I grab my paints, opting for the safe choices: Payne's Gray and King's Blue. They've thickened over time. I mean, they all do, we all do, eventually take on the shape of our containers. And when I do wipe the crust, that’s maybe when the soil grows, the second the mind gives room internally despite the noise others have packed on to our sensibilities, such as the idea of harvesting honey from Arabian jasmine, or falling to a soft place over and over again.