sometimes we forget

As the year closes in on death and a rebirth of a new year, I’ve become reflective on events past. Revisiting moments of the last 37 years on earth (although the first few are impossible to remember, although I do like to visit a memory from, I suppose, when I was very small. I remember being in a booster seat of some kind - One of those ones that bounce and shake you , provide entertainment to give your mom a break. One of those things - the contraption was set on our kitchen table at my childhood home in Pittsburgh and was positioned in front of the window. I remember staring out to the dogwood tree that was planted just outside.

I love that memory.

And I suppose it’s why I tend to have a habit of getting lost in space. Staring at nothing or sometimes at everything.

Something I apparently have always done. Like, today, I spent an entire morning staring out the studio window, Watching a storm dump rain and lightening dance across the sky.

In the studio the last week , the past two weeks or so I guess , I have been working on updating my website and preparing new work for the new year ... this has caused me to spend a bit more time contemplating all the above mentioned as well as reviewing my current works I am in the process of working on. I always love the new year - a time to reformat and refresh. Every year since 2011 I have tried to bring something new to the studio. Refreshing the site by either rebuilding it or even just simple changes always feels so good, like shedding a layer if your being. A chance to review everything you have worked on... refine where you want to go with it all.

I am finding my work is becoming slightly more refined. Taking more time on it's execution. I suppose a part of getting older. But also, I feel like I understand finally where the whole story is heading within the broader narrative of my portfolio.

I have always had a love for Egon Schiele. I’ve been noticing his figurative styles have been reappearing in my work again. A direction I haven’t visited in over 10 years. I’ve also been finding myself again attracted to the bold masters and the classics... as well as contemporary masters such as Modi, Freud along with the cubists

( whom have always had profound influence on me ), Braque, Cézanne, Picasso.

I suppose what ultimately I am trying to say here, is that my love for painting seems to have returned. The smell of the OIls. The way pigments react and behave with each other. How light, shadow and form can dictate a novel of emotions and ideas all within a single image.

Sometimes, when we love something, we forget why. It's just there. We know we love it. But, it's just there... we take it for granted. When we almost lose what it is that we love, that passions fire is rekindled and we can burn again with it.

And hopefully the next time, with such an intensity that it will not go unseen.

~m

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