I create from a place I access upon entering my studio and ‘beginning to work’.
Often I don’t know what that ‘beginning’ will lead to. I start by clearing off my work table and putting things back in their places: brushes, paints, used containers. A scrap of paper or a discarded object will arrest my focus and initiate my path. Once started, the work leads me. I don’t lead the work.
I marvel at this process of connecting, unfolding, building, thinking. Equipped with training and practice over a span of disciplines, I call upon a variety of techniques to create; to choose the medium that best expresses what I need to say. How it all comes together, though, remains a mystery to me. I begin, and then follow; and when one direction doesn’t work, I set forth on another. The hardest thing that I do, and maybe the most important, is to risk destroying a piece of work in the process of trying to make it better.
Often, when I look at work I’ve completed, I am humbled by the knowledge that a force greater than myself was responsible for its creation, and I’m grateful to have acquired the tools to make it happen.