A Painful Aspiration

My desire to paint an abstract had become obsessive and I had no direction to paint one. At the same time I had heard of encaustics but no one around here had ever done any. I read what I could about it and had to to search impossible grounds to find the dry pigments needed to color my wax. I started off with the wrong kind of wax but fortuantely a few months after the painting was finished, it finally hardened to the brittle shiny content it should have. At this point one of my problems was composition. This particular painting is quite large 50"X50". I believe the larger the format the better an abstract painting looks.

"I have never been able to teach creativity in step-by-step exercises with common themes. That approach feels like an exercise class, although it no doubt helps people by giving clear and concrete procedures.

Perhaps I have never been able to tell another person what to make or how to make it, because I am ultimately interested in artistic expressions that emerge like images from a dream. For me art has to flow naturally from the streams of an individual person's experperience.

Creation is a process of emanation. Nothing will happen unless we start working and allow the practice of our particular disciplines to mix with the streams of ideas and experiences that are constantly moving through daily life. These currents are never "blocked". Therefore the practice of creation involves the ability to tap into them." Shaun McNiff from his book Trust the Process