I love art

Since I was a child I have been a creative individual. I think it all started because my parents traveled the world in a VW bus so my imagination was my best friend in the first couple of years on earth. I found my imagination early by looking into nature and create images in the clouds or rock formations. Then I started to color and doodle what I saw in the world and replicated them on blank paper that lead to creating cars or cities of the future on other planets. As I got older I would create stuff with my hands from sand to clay and then more technically stuff out of wood scraps. My whole life I have just been very creative and I had a need to express myself through making of stuff.

I forgot about art for sometime while chasing other pursuits. It wasn’t till I was struck with one of life’s difficult time where I found myself stuck. Perhaps even lost and just dealing with some pain that had me questioning everything. I had this energy that was building up, lingering and trapped. Knowing where I was and uncertain where my future would be and not knowing the next moves to make just had me with a feeling of being stuck in a liminal place. I needed to shake things up.

I was walking in art store and came across the canvas aisle. I saw this big 4ft x 4ft canvas. Siting on the top self to high to reach I gravitating toward it. I never painted a big canvas. In fact the closet experience to doing a canvas was one of those little oil painting sets for beginners and it came with a small thick cardboard canvas. The gift was a very short lived thanks to my narcissistic father who criticized my art skills of a 10 year old and compared it to someone who was formally trained. This was the memory stirring in my head as I scanned over the different sizes. Maybe it was a subconscious connection to the square images we thumb through on instagram but there was something about that big square canvas that I liked. I picked up some foam brushes, a couple of acrylic paint tubes and I went home ready to create. I ordered an artist easel and while waiting for its delivery day I walked by the canvas leaning on by bedroom wall thinking about what to paint. I would come up with different ideas from seascapes, to travel destinations, fruit and flowers and to famous architecture. I kept wanting to painting a portrait but I kept talking myself out of it on the fact that I never had any formal training. I settled on painting an image of Frank Lloyd Wrights ‘Falling water’. I found an image I wanted to recreate the day I set up my easel I had started to layout the lines of the famous architecture. I sat and looked at my tools and realized I didn’t about not have all the right paint brushes and the colors.

I set up my art station in the garage and stared at the canvas and my three paint colors I had and my foam brushes. Wondering what I could do with what I had. I stared and stared and nothing came to be. After about 20 mins I decided to get a portable speaker and my iPod. I put on a play list and sat there waiting to be inspired and just thinking about life. Still another 20 mins went by and nothing. Then a song came on and it just hit an emotional cord. I noticed this energy stirring inside me so I put the song on repeat and just let that energy come up to the surface. I let myself get lost in the rhythm and in the beat of the music as it washed over me. My body seemed to absorb the song and I got lost in the electronic noise while my emotions dance inside me. Then like an ocean wave I didn’t see I was hit with this feeling of creative. It was pouring out of my heart, emanating outward from my chest and down my arm, through my finger tips and out of foam brush across the canvas. My arm moving in an uncontrollable way across the canvas with no order or structure. Just a pure genuine expression of the heart. What was built up inside me was being transferring onto the canvas stroke by stroke. By the type I was done I had this beautiful abstract painting and it was like nothing I have ever created before. I was in disbelief of what I was looking at and it was beautiful. It was a combination of new and old emotions that had been bottled up for some time and unleashed and displayed for the world to see. This caged up creativity was final free and it felt like spiritual awakening. I came to understand that my passion some how, somewhere, that I had lost it in the process of checking off boxes of life. I was so focus on those things I forgot and lost track of what truly made me happy.

I realized that I am not truly happy unless I am creating art. I love taking photos, I love making a sculptures and brushing paint onto a canvas. I think that is my purpose in the universe to make art and share it with the world. I love the process of creativity from the good and the bad. The broken moments and the beautiful moment and I love learning from the failures and the mistakes that come from it. I find magic in those accidental moments where the material meets and in an unplanned moment makes something new. In those moments where that wonderful accident happened however small or however big; I find the most happiness in those moments. It is what keeps my inner child that finds the world so amazing alive in my soul. Making art can be very difficult to spend hours, days or even months on an art piece. It can be frustrating and even painful especially when you push it and what your thought was perfect becomes less by the change that happens. Sometimes that can ruin my vision or loose that perfect collection of colors. The mold or a model breaks and your have to restart from scratch. However frustrating that moment can be it is all collection of success and failure that make the process of creating so exciting.

One of my art style I love creating is adding layers of paint with a pallet knife onto a large canvas. To complete one of these art pieces takes months. That process is what is so amazing because as I work on the art piece I get lost into the music and I apply the paint with a pallet knife in a type of meditation. Everyday I have a ritual of staring at the work being created and I let the music in and my emotions dance and guide the stroke on the canvas. Depending on the size of the canvas it can be 10 strokes or 40 strokes and with all the previous experiences I make intuitive calculations on the stroke style, to the pressure and how the paint will reacts with a previous layer. Then I let the work dry over night. The next day I repeat the same process with another color. This goes on for months while I build up layers. Layers on top of layers on top of layers till the overlapping creates a landscape of canyons and edges. It is these relationships between the colors and textures that I fall in love with. When it’s all done my art has another layer of magic. As the sun moves through the day it’s sunlight catches the edges of paint and creates shadows giving its life of its own. My process is the same but there will never be the same identical pieces ever made and in that every finish art piece is one of a kind. My art process is more about a spiritual ritual between the music and my emotions that is transferred onto the canvas in a creative style. In the end product someone is enjoy a piece of my soul with years of learned intuition and creativity. It’s simple, raw and genuine emotion expressed in art.

Art is very much a fluid expression and exploration that is inspired by the world, by a person, by a passage in a book, or a sunset mixed with a curiosity of how thing work and materials play with each other. So for me I find it impossible to just stay in one style of creation. The possibilities becomes endless with art so it can never be boring or monotonous. That’s a big part of why I love it so much. The other reason I love art is from years of going to art museums. I think of them as the cathedrals of human expression. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is one of my favorites. Over the years I started to pay more attention to the spectacle that is an art museum. It really is a beautiful spiritual place where people from all over the world come to visit. A type of modern day art pilgrimage to a building that houses art works with is a collection of peaceful people coming together from all over the world speaking every language you can imagine. What I always love is watching how people experience art. How they look at art. What captures someone’s attention and why? What keeps a person for prolong periods of time? People can walk by 20, 30, 60 pieces of art and there will always be one or two that just captures them and holds their gaze, their attention, their dreams, their fears, their imagination and more. In those moments they are connected to the work and to the artist. An internal conversation starts stripping away the layers we wrap ourselves with and allow us to see something new, to see something different, a different perspective, it can inspire and move our souls in profound ways even heal our heart. Ir evoke a conversation with strangers and friends. It is in those moments that art is a beautiful connection of the human condition. It is in the expression of ideas and expression of emotions through the language of color and creativity that unites all of us as one species. So I say that Art is the most important thread that binds us in our human history and our human spirituality. Technologies will always come and go, but it is in the expression of art that connects our shared human emotion and experiences that bind us together floating on this blue planet in amidst the stars.