Years ago I got into a kind of creative flow that went like this: winter was when I worked on large, detailed paintings while summer was for getting out and doing things and events and traveling and the like. I found myself painting and sort of hibernating during many winters because life feels quieter and more internal. It's helpful for allowing my mind and body to settle, focusing on the finer details of my work. Come summer - when life bursts with exuberant busy-ness, I'd pick up and go out and share and be more social. During those summer months, I often plan out a course of paintings to work through the winter - a general game plan, if you will - a setlist of paintings - and return to the studio.

It's like a moebius strip where I would go far enough inwards in one direction that I'd eventually circle back in the opposite direction… and then far enough out in the other direction, and so on. Back and forth, round and round.

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I was going through all sorts of files, updating web stuff, doing businessy things, cataloging and organizing, as one has to do. Sometimes I'm struck by the fact that there is just so much art I've created over many years. And much of it, I think, returns to this painting, Surrender (28" x 48"), painted in 1996 when I was 19.Painting it was a turning point in my life. I'd had this experience earlier that summer which had left me filled with questions and doubts. Basically, I was struggling with letting go of the yoke of social and parental expectations.

In my sketchbook, during one of my classes, I made a drawing the vision I'd had - after getting twisted around through some dark and frustrated rivers of mental constructs - of this land I arrived into of just... endless exuberant love with the sky folding into the earth and vice versa and these beings just dancing over the hills grabbing pieces of clouds and LOVE was written all over everything. I decided to paint it - maybe just the third or fourth painting I'd ever made.

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