Collected letters
It took me 3 years to paint this. In art school they told us not to do that. Don't beat it to death, move on, they said. And indeed, if you spent 3 years on a single painting while in school you would be in danger of graduating before someone could grade you. (horrors!) But in real life there are no grades and you live your questions for years. Someone once asked me at a party at what point, exactly, did I consider myself to have crossed the line from wanna-be to real artist. My answer was "When my work stopped being about escaping and began to be the engine that drove my transformation and the language I use to think. " I find that in order to solve a problem in my painting practice I can't just learn more technique or acquire better theory; I have to dissolve the problem by becoming a person who belongs on the other side of whatever limit the problem embodies. Its arduous. Sometimes it takes me so long to take one more step forward I feel like I must be on the leading edge of the slow evolution movement.
Is there a slow evolution movement? If not, then let us start one. It would be like slow food for the soul. It would be change that is driven by an inner necessity to become the worthy consort of the things we love, and not by the informational blitzkrieg of the daily news and the bottom line.