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?