I have a folder labelled “2019 work” and so far it goes a little something like this:

Fresh grief. WIP, oil & gold metal leaf on canvas mounted on board. This happened when we lost Puppy. It destroyed me.

I’m stuck in the making of things. At the moment I want all images reflecting themselves (because one is never enough) and diptychs are so compelling & brain twisting to make. And twice the work, boom boom. And then there’s scale. Big is so much fun & I like the encompassing effect, the inescapable, grandiose, wrap around presence of them but small is more physically realistic. Then small calls for such intense detail and I’m not workshy and…its an ongoing argument so I’ve begun both; a large scale diptych and a small pair at 8x10”. On this, and on many other occasions, I’m splitting my attention between too many things right now & feeling ineffective in all of them. Sometimes that overwhelm really freezes me. Often.

End game for these images is oil over gold leaf (*Fresh grief*, above) // oil over pigment ink on canvas (digitally printed fabric with oil overpainting). It may be superstitiously dodgy to air this work before having figured it out to the end. Not shown here, for that reason, is *A singular moment of forever*, the small & large diptychs I’m making (along with *Fresh Grief*). Which makes all the other things above just an image dump I think. Because overwhelm.

I wish I could say “that’s done & I can carry on make pictures”, but its like praying for something then worrying about it. The debate never ends. I keep mentally pushing things around, physically pushing things around, talking over the top of others, poking with sticks, running with scissors, then handing it over to God, then continually fact checking God, making sure He’s on the job. Supervising. Spot checking. Rephrasing for emphasis. Lacking faith. Making sure God knows how it is. Re-doing shit, I keep running through stuff again and again. I dont know what to do or how to fix things. Do you think it could be that there’s other (not necessarily bigger) things in my life that I’m having trouble resolving and accepting which is reflected in my work? Why yes, how perceptive, in fact there are numerous things that are disturbing me, currently. As an intensely private person (literally not true. I have a whole website all about me) I speak in pictures and metaphors but not, I think, explicitly, its more of a vibe of the things and I truly do not know what to do. I dont even know how to speak, what do I do, make pictures because they are theoretically solvable? And people aren’t? Some might say yes! thats it, it doesn’t matter, things will settle themselves, God is on the job, and then I’m talking to the internet! Here! Instead of people! Overwhelm. Image dump. Stream of consciousness I dont have a clue pecking at the keyboard circle back to the beginning: 2019 work so far looks a little bit like this…

I close in saying that everything will be ok, my work is great.