She asked me where I found the patience to do the work, a question I don’t think I’ve been asked. I did not have a ready answer. Since then I’ve been thinking about her question. Where do I find the patience, being a restless, anxious type? I’m thinking patience is akin to focus and that focus requires a quiet mind, so the question has morphed into “How do I quiet my mind.” The best answer I have for that is to give the mind something to do while I do something else.

All artists have various tricks and techniques to get into the studio and work. Mine has been to clean and organize the studio or clean the house before I start a session in the studio. Here are some other ways I’ve found to quiet the mind and, therefore, give me patience:

Counting
Washing dishes
Weeding the garden
Repeating the same task over and over (pretty much how I do a painting)
Taking a really deep breath before I touch brush to canvas
Playing with my dog, Zack
Sweeping the floor

The paintings are a reflection of the unfathomable, that for which there is no complete narrative, only brief and infrequent glimpses. And I don’t mean to be overblown; that’s simply what they are. They are also a mundane history: I made these marks with this color for six weeks last November; in the fall of last year I spent one week collecting the seed pods from clumps of tribulus terrestris (goathead or puncturevine).

My paintings and other objects I have created are unabashedly retinal. They do not possess a narrative as in ‘this painting is about…’ This lack of narrative, I naively think, is obvious in the works themselves. They are, actually, about no story, no narrative, a reflection rather of a state of being as no-thing gazing out at inexplicable phenomena. Most of the time creating a work is not done in the actual creation, but in this state, sitting on my front porch, for instance, looking. And if I can recapture a way of being in which I lose track of the names of that which I see, something truly miraculous can occur during which all there is and me are all subjects gazing at each other.

If you take away what you do and the stories you tell about who you are, if your history were erased, your family and everyone you know were to disappear, who is left? And what is it that that subject which is left is experiencing?

A painting is never finished – it simply stops in interesting places.

Paul Gardner

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.

Michelangelo

All material in nature, the mountains and the streams and the air and we, are made of Light which has been spent; and this crumpled matter called material casts a shadow, and the shadow belongs to Light.

Louis Kahn