I lived inside this piece for a solid week.
The goal was to have something new to hang above my bedroom mantle, so i also chose to work in that same space. every morning i would wake up confronted by it. this wasn’t by accident though. i wanted to be totally immersed with it.

i spent days working on the first layer of marks. stepping back and forth deciding where to put things. i was scared to make decisions. some days it felt like it was leading to something, others it felt like it was crumbling under its own weight. by this point i can usually see where the work is going to go but i was uncertain in this moment. i thought, why am i not gaining clarity yet?

i got out of the house for a while and came back to it with fresh eyes. i realized i wasn’t fully owning the work. i hadn’t risked anything for it yet. it was lazy it was entirely safe. that night, it was about deciding to continue the initial path to something that might be “good,” or taking the risk for another direction that could hold something better. it was about destroying what i had made previously and rebuilding on top of it.

I wake up confronted again. I took a good look at it and make the decision to make the mess. to go to war as i began to call it. i started making marks in places i hadn’t initially planned and experimented with what just felt right to do. i took a step back, and sighed with relief. i could finally see it going somewhere. it wasn’t nearly done, but i could feel it arriving somewhere. this was repeated over and over again.

It was this process I learned that some days are easy, other days are about resistance to what i don’t want to face. It is resistance to make the mark out of fear that it won’t live up to my preconceived expectations. choosing to let go of that resistance is my act of war. it’s about not falling in love with the decisions i’ve already made and instead challenging them and rebuilding them

this isn’t entirely about art though…we all have to wake up every morning and choose to make that first decision. we declare war as soon as our feet hit the floor. the question is who’s willing to embrace the battle