10 Year Anniversary: Painting Diary 9 of 30

Painting Diary 9 of 30: Along the White River, 2013

After returning home from Arkansas I landed at my mom’s house in Marysville, Washington. I set up a modest workspace in the unused dining room and resumed the crazy experimental outpouring. Yet it wasn’t quite so crazy since the floors were carpet, damn it. 

That was a good year, 2013. When I first got back I went and sat for a weekend with ayahuasca, the first ceremonies in three years, and my first proper three. It was a life changing weekend and a perfect start to a fantastically productive year in many ways. Soon I was starting to steer away from my year of wild dedicated play and back into more thought-out and carefully painted work. 

I remember a distinct shift that year in my dedication to art. One day I had the epiphany that I was not making art just for myself anymore and I wasn’t striving for recognition. I was satisfying a deep and inherent spiritual need and a want to contribute something of value to the world. I realized that the best I could hope for was to inspire others to create.  

This was one of the first paintings where I tried mixing acrylic and oil paints. I started with a very watery messy abstract pass over the whole canvas in acrylic, not really knowing what I was making, but having a whole lot of fun doing it. After establishing a nice texture I decided to switch to oils to take advantage of their look and feel that I love soo much.

When I was in Arkansas one day I was out for a walk along the river that ran past my dads shop. It was late in the year and nestled up in a bed of rusty brown leaves I found a nearly perfect deer skull and some other random bones laying around it. It had been there awhile and was clean and bleached white from the sun. I took it with me and it was now sitting on a shelf in my studio. 

The subject in this painting appeared pretty late into the painting. In the messy abstract shapes I could kind of make out a deer skull and so I decided that I’d push it in that direction, using the Arkansas skull as reference I decided to recreate in a way the scene where I found the skull.

Along The White River, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 2013