Here is another recent painting. Like the last one I posted, Lost Forest is smallish (a couple feet wide) and again painted with oils. There is a lot of detail, particularly textural, that is lost in the photograph, but then it’s a painting and not a digital image, and it’s built up and scraped and over-painted and scraped again. There has been stuff stuck to it and then ripped off, leaving glue residue. There has even been some stenciling done at one stage. I think looking at the actual painting, you can pick up on some of that history, but in the photo is seems more unified as an image. I think we live in a culture where many people have become used to looking at pictures of any sort on a computer or on a phone and sometimes I think that’s a shame. Making a painting makes me feel I’m in touch with early image-makers, drawing on a rock wall or scratching an image in the sand. I like that these paintings are slow. They take a long time. Sometimes they’re fugitive. I get close to an image and I back away or paint over or change it into something else. How many sessions does it take? This one was started years ago and abandoned. I keep a bunch of old abandoned paintings around, paintings that have lost their way, paintings that won’t settle. After all that time, are they starting points for new paintings, or did I just need to take a little rest for a few years before giving it another go?
27th Street 
Why shouldn’t you need to paint…..? Silly you.
I’ll give you the short answer to that. Although in my own little brain, I sometimes think I make some pretty good paintings, I recognize there is little public interest in my work. After years of painting and exhibiting and ultimately storing dozens of paintings, I decided I would not pay for storage for the things any more, and I destroyed many paintings. It was a very difficult thing to do. Yes, I saved some of them. It turned out there were some I simply could not bring myself to destroy.
Since that time, I’ve continued to paint, but the whole business has slowed right down and I don’t feel the same level of urgency to paint. I have a number of pictures and a couple constructions kicking around that I’ve never exhibited, but I’m not in hurry to exhibit them.
When I look at one of my paintings, I think, how the hell did I make that? How did I get there? Some painters are blessed with the ability to conceive of a painting, map it out, paint it up and there you go. No me. Each time it feels like I’m starting over. But when I start working on them, when I get deep in, at a certain point they come alive in my mind and they draw me in and nag at me and compel me to resolve them.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to write a novel, and trying to be a better button accordion player. There are lots of ways to live a creative life.
You are quite the abstract artist…
Merci, Rebelle. Try as I might, I haven’t been able to kick this nasty painting habit of mine. I stay away from the studio for a while and I think, there, I don’t need to paint. I’m free of it, finally. And then one day I walk by and a painting calls out to me.
Hey Bud, get in here.
Leave me alone. I don’t need you.
Hey, have a heart, can’t you see I need work?
Work? What can I do?
Re-imagine me, that’s what. Get your butt in here and get to work.
And I think, it can’t hurt to spend an afternoon on just this one painting….it’s not like I have to show it to anyone or anything like that.
Next thing you know, I’m back at it.
They say he went to a clinic in Switzerland exchanged all the blood in his system with blood that had never seen a painting.