Notes:

Generally speaking, what’s most interesting to me about a painting is how well it balances order and chaos, ultimately to arrive at something finished and whole. I like it when the contrast between the chaos and the order is most apparent, or in other words when the balance is right at the tipping point, but tipping just toward order.

When I moved in with my partner to a ramshackle farmhouse, my whole life became a project to be managed, and those ideas about art took on new resonance. I started seeing the necessity of balancing order and chaos everywhere around me, because order, in itself, was out of the question. Today the goats in the field and the picturesque barn don’t really remind me of a pastoral landscape painting or a genre scene of a milkmaid. They remind me of hard and messy work with little reward, just to keep things functioning. Which also, in a funny-but-not-funny way, reminds me of abstract painting.

A homestead is a metaphor for possibility, for making it your own, for the space to create some version of a dream. The same can be said for a painting. The relationship between the two has become a rich source for me, even as my faith in both can wax and wane from day to day. While I sometimes cynically think that making a painting is just escapism–a way to avoid doing any of the infinite number of other things that always seem to need to be done–more and more I have come to see the ways in which painting can inform and enrich the messy process of living, and vice versa, perhaps even in ways that touch on more universal human experiences than my own.