"Are you Suffering?"

It's raining. It's going well. A nervous energy courses through me. I sat last night with some five or six recently finished paintings hanging from my aged wall and just looked for awhile. I feel that I finally have a hand hold, that I'm just begining on something that will be expanded upon. Endlessly I peer and ask, what choices are being made to bring a painting into being? What's worth noticing? Do I start from a sketch, a photograph, a memory? It's so often heard, the prompting- go experiment! And it always sounds so fanciful to me, I picture some empty-nested housewife, someone with a life more secure than my own, and after staring at their 90th attempt at some flowers in a vase they rip the bun out and throw some loose canvas on the floor and attack it. They 'experiment' the way adolescents do with sex or drugs, they run wild, they foget to wash their hair for weeks in this mad dionysian frenzy of creativity. Their usual reserve is rejuvinated by spontanity. But I rarely brush my hair, not for behomienism but out of laziness. I used to scatter the paper all over the floor and hunch down with it and get into it and this was the natural way. But since I noticed something, a dissatisfaction rose in me, maybe I just grew some. And so my experimentation is quite the opposite, methodical and pre-thought. I'm still going through a laundrey list of new experiences- and I still get quite excited over some of them- but mostly they would bore the laymen. I found a thrill in experiencing what viscisouty & adhesion meant after staring uncomprehending at all those art store catalogues. I'm seeing light in gradations, but it is more an experience of unveiling, de-mystifying, finding explanation in the place of revelation. I'm doing so much work I'm pissed I've had to get a regular job, that my camera broke so I can't share the latest paintings here. I've fallen into rich hours of resentment, where I spite any artist who shows a light hearted concern for their craft. It's not fair to them, but it's not fair for any of us. Lately when i meet someone who tells me their an artist or introduces me to one, I want to ask with all this accumulated accusation, "Are you suffering?" or just say, "Oh, I'm so sorry." While my moments of discovery are jubulent and this new found determination is strange and new to me, it gives me a quiet internal pride, a soft sense voice whispering, "You might get there, you'll keep going.." Equally far down I know there is no where to get, and so I can enjoy just being in this place of knowing what I want. The frustration is more outwardly directed and though unfelt in this moment (an untraceable anxiety seems to have replaced all else) it's been showing up enough lately to be fit for mention. This is all to be said for this moment.