clarity

I paint a lot of common objects.  I think back to when I first started with watercolor:  I had grown sensitive to the solvents in oil paint, they made me nauseous every time I sat down to work.  I had to try something new, my livelihood depended on it!  I didn't know what I was doing, and that was incredibly scary.  Picking a subject simple and repetitive was the easiest way out of a seemingly insurmountable challenge: come up with a new skill, a new way to make a living, a new aesthetic.   Grab an object.  Examine that object. Paint it.  Repeat. Don't think about concept and content, just learn how to paint.  What began as an escape from the responsibility of having to think up a new idea every day ended up becoming a concept in and of itself.  The quantity of the work grew and grew as the days passed, the paintings told an elegant story of the most mundane aspects of life.  And in the midst of the most terrible grief and emptiness of losing my mom, I learned how to start from scratch, I learned: its never too late to start over.

“So what do we do? Anything. Something. So long as we just don't sit there. If we screw it up, start over. Try something else. If we wait until we've satisfied all the uncertainties, it may be too late. 
- Lee Iacocca”