Slow Skins Indigo Painting

About: (Painted during my 2020 California desert trip to Garth’s Boulder Garden in Rimrock) My paintings become a place I embrace dissonance and explore the unknown. It is the cliff at the edge of my security, the place where logic and language falls apart into pure experience. In the zone of abstraction, paint becomes my literal thought, and that thought doesn’t involve words. The thought involves an inner communication where I get to connect with the ecologies of who I am. My senses project onto the canvas and fill with awareness as they experience the medium. From this place of painting, I get to return to the jungle, to tune into my own nature. I get to face my fears and uncertainties, hold contradiction, explore the fringes of who I am and, whether harmonic or dissonant, I get to investigate the things that I have no words for. During times when the world generates so much dissonance, we need thought-spaces that art provides. Art gives us a language to think and communicate fresh thoughts. It gives us an interaction to deal with all of this uncertainty. It launches us into a new space where we get to process all that we are going through. It can be a place of harmony. In times when we have no words, we have art. Why I Paint Nature: The thing I love about nature is that when you’re there, your sense just go exploring. You expand out into the space and feels so fresh and alive. So with my painting I want to incorporate ways the senses can explore, I love using texture to activate touch, and even taste sometimes when texture is combined with color. Then there’s musical transitions and rhythm in the marks, and of course they’re visual. I love world building because we get to be our location, and when we are put somewhere new we feel new. We basically get to meet new parts of ourselves and be more connected within. There's moments we have where we encounter nature of such spectacular beauty that it takes us outside of ourselves to a place of great calm and serenity. I believe these moments happen because we accept the world exactly as it is. We don't complain that the tree is out of place or that nature should be something else. There is no if/then sequence to our happiness in that moment (if the mountain was different, then I would be happy here), but instead we accept everything as it is. With nature we accept it with all of the problems it may have, but with ourselves we may have a resistance to accept ourselves as we are, with all of the problems we have, or maybe I should say, all of the problems we think we have. We don't see ourselves as inspired when we resist and put conditions of if/then on ourselves. Being in nature tunes us to be outside of ourselves without conditions.