Sunday Morning Bliss (2019, oil on canvas)

"When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be."
-Tao de Ching

I studied and played music for many years, before an overuse injury forced me to relinquish my musical aspirations almost 22 years ago. It was devastating blow to my psyche at the time. I had chosen to abandon my graduate studies in fine art so I could focus on music, foregoing any alternate career path in favor of devoting long hours to study, practice, rehearsal and performance, as well as all of the marketing-related duties associated with leading a musical group. Suddenly finding myself unable to even hold a guitar pick left me feeling aimless and dejected, at least until my innate tenacity forced me to re-enroll in art school and begin painting again, ultimately leading me back to my first (and true) love. Occasionally, we might find ourselves astray in a rugged and impenetrable wilderness, thinking that we have irrevocably lost our path, only to one day stumble upon our destination and the realization that whatever trials and tribulations we had suffered while seemingly lost, were necessary rites of passage.

The study of music taught me a great deal about visual art and I constantly find myself thinking about the parallels between the two forms. Value (lights and darks) is like rhythm in music. Areas of strong value contrast are like staccato passages in music, with pronounced beats surrounded by bits of silence. Conversely, areas in a painting and drawing with little or now value contrast are like legato passages in music, where the notes transition smoothly one into the next with no space between.

One of the biggest similarities between music and art is the correlation between pitch and color. Interestingly, the color theory that my approach is based on uses a 12 step color wheel composed of three primaries (yellow, red, blue), three secondaries made by combining the primaries (orange, green, violet) and the intermediate colors between each primary and secondary (red-orange, yellow-green, etc.) arranged so that the complimentary colors are opposite one another. Western music is composed of 12 pitches and the associated keys are often diagramed in a circle (the Circle of 5ths) with contrasting keys (the ones with the fewest notes in common and, hence, the most dissonance when played together) opposite each other. I organize my paintings using color tonalities in a way that is very similar to how a composer organizes a piece of music around specific tonalities. The ultimate goal in both cases is harmony.

Sometimes these color tonalities are fairly simple. Like a tune written exclusively with the notes in the C-major scale, I might create an image based entirely on variations of the color green. More often, though, I like more complex tonalities, like a piece of music that modulates through several keys. I rarely think this way while actually working, but years of practice (and a multitude of failures!) have developed my ability to organize and harmonize the colors intuitively in my attempt to transform my content into visual form.

This painting is based, essentially, on the analogous cool colors: ranging from red-violet to violet to blue-violet to blue and blue-green – colors which all contain some measure of blue, the coolest color. This helps give the painting its overall cool feeling, but there are also quite few warmer colors including yellow, yellow-green and orange which, having been weakened by the addition of white (what we artists refer to as "tinting"), provide just enough contrasts to actually make the cool colors seem even cooler than if they were the only colors in the painting. This is common practice amongst music composers as well, who will insert a "sad" minor chord into an overall "happy" major key-based piece, the resulting contrast making the happier sounding chords seem even happier.

I find this approach very helpful in my work and I don't think I could have developed the ability to think this way about color had I not spent years away from painting, with my attention focused on the study of music. The older I get, the more I realize how important it is to have faith that our lives will unfold exactly the way they are meant to. How could it be otherwise?

When You Least Expect It (oil on canvas, 2019)

I live in northern Maine. It has been brutally cold here this winter and we're on the verge of breaking the record for annual snow accumulation. A few days ago, however, we were afforded a brief respite from the sub-zero temperatures and snowfall and I siezed the opportunity to go for a walk. I thought about the seemingly countless hours that I spent, especially during the first eight or nine years that I've lived here, trekking around the landscape within a three mile radius of my house, in all manner of weather, laden with a sketchbook or drawing board and a backpack filled with drawing materials, until I would eventually stop in some field or woods and attempt to translate what I was looking at into some kind of visual form. I was trying to make art. More often than not, however, I failed. I would occasionally end up with a really great drawing or painting or a sketch that I would later develop into a successful image. I've posted a lot of them here on this blog over the past ten years and many of the best paintings and drawings ended up in the hands of collectors, thus enabling me to continue to pursue my passion.

But the majority of the work that I did made it's way, sooner or later, into the landfill.

During my struggles to turn my experiences into visual form, I learned a great deal about drawing, composition, color mixing, paint application and how to manipulate art materials in a way that creates the illusion of solid form, light and atmospheric space, on a flat surface. I also learned many other important lessons such as how to keep an easel from blowing away in the wind, not to use oil paint outdoors during black fly season, to always spray the pastel fixative downwind, thunderstorms move faster than I can run, and to be polite to the Border Patrol agents whenever they feel the need to interrogate me. But the most important lesson that I learned was about both the inevitability and the necessity of failure. Despite my best efforts and my extensive training, sometimes the work just isn't going to be successful. This is no reflection on my "talent" or lack thereof but, rather, an integral part of the creative process which involves taking risks, pushing beyond the boundaries of our technical and theoretical abilities and trusting our instincts. In so doing, we give up a great deal of control over the final outcome and we risk failure, but the payoff is that, sometimes, we surprise ourselves with wonderful work that comes from a place that our intellect does not have access to.

If you are involved in any kind of creative endeavor, it's imperative that you allow yourself the freedom to fail. Rather than letting the fear of failure inhibit you from working, you should embrace the fear and work as much as possible. When we force ourselves to go outside our comfort zones, real learning and real creativity happen.

I estimate that I've spent over 10,000 hours, with art supplies at hand, out in the landscape around my home since moving to Maine in 2006. Although a significant percentage of that time was spent walking, absorbing the colors and light, sounds and smells, and the history of the landscape, the bulk of the time was spent pushing pastels or charcoal or graphite or oil paint around on a sheet of paper or canvas, in the hopes of pulling a cohesive image out of the Æther. If I were to compare the amount of time that I spent to the number of actual finished works of art that I created, I might easily dismay. But it was time well spent. Not only did I learn myriad methods of successfully transforming mere art materials into physical manifestations of the visceral experiences I was having, I learned just about every conceivable way of failing to do that.

During all of those thousands of hours, I thought I was trying to make art, but what I was really trying to do was to make an artist.