Tell me it isn’t so that it’s been five months since my last update. The following piece has been more or less completed since June, with some slight tweaks since that I’m not sure are actually perceivable. I think I shared an early version somewhere, when it was more naïve and less noise, pulled it, and then formed it into this.
In the time since, I held off from sincerely putting out due to some anxiety about “form” I’ve felt. Why the need to explode things into static and meat rather than making beautiful figures or scenes? But of course, I think it’s hard to judge a piece if you’re staring at it in retrospect through an iPhone Mini rather than seeing it wide and expanded.
Looking closely at the noise, making it significant in one’s view, you can see thousands of different images. It is not formless, it has the form I wanted and the form your mind might grasp at. Whatever that means, in deluded rationalizations I make of my own work for no reason.
But of reasons, there’s another I can think of for why I held off. It felt weird to release this after three months of nothing but it feels right after five months.
In June, the piece felt like a dead-end, there were no visions of what came after it. Three years of doing digital pieces and it felt like my wheels were caught in this noise fetishism. I was asking, “where to next?” and couldn’t see a thing. I know the answer now. I have a piece following this one ready to go, pending some time to let this one breathe, and I have another in progress. They are a return to paints, at least as a base, with digital doddery slacked on for good measure.
Yada-yada-yada, here’s the piece:
“different blossoms” | digital painting, 2025
Postscripts:
—The talk of “months” reminds me of a fun exercise where you calculate a period of time as a percentage of one’s life-so-far or anticipated life expectancy. This is not actually fun and I don’t recommend it, the number is never as small as one would like it to be.
—My last post had talk of meditation, yes? Well, as an update to that, I’m not meditating so much anymore, though I’ve replaced it in a way with chanting. I’ll get more into that in the future, maybe.
—I have other creative projects in the works at the present aside from visual art, including writing and video. Granted, the writing is currently stalled. I guess I’m writing right now, but I mean more in the specific writing project I’m indirectly referring to. This doesn’t count. And the video is a great unknown as to whether it will pan out or not, simply because I don’t know how my computer will handle rendering an edit of 100+ hours of footage at once.
—I probably should not have titled the piece that accompanied my first letter as “the window is closing” because that sounds like marketing spam. A happy hello to any email filters, please don’t disappear these posts forever. Mwah.