Dancing Shoes 2024

For the past two years I have been finding homes for my paintings.  Fifty years of working on a regular basis creates a lot of work. I've been contacting museums, art centers, and universities to see if they would like to add my work to their collections, and, once they agree, I began the arduous process of locating, packing, and shipping the work to them. As well, in March of this year,  MOPA at the San Diego Museum of Art opened a 40 year retrospective of my work. An enormous undertaking, it pretty much consumed me for much those two years.  Between the two, and because it hadn't seemed quite right to make more art when I had so much, I pretty much stopped working for the years 2022 and 2023. 

However, when you identify as an artist, you don't feel right not making work. You feel a phony-you ARE a phony.  So, with much fear and trepidation I started working again, pretty much sure that all that magic I call on when I make my images was gone.  In fact, I was sure of it.  Why even bother?  But with shaking knees and a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach I put on my painting shoes and began to paint--pouring, dripping--just basically moving(lots of) paint around.  The result was 20 beautiful abstract paintings, waiting for me to start to form "stories" on them.  And once I started,  I couldn't stop.  I felt like the little girl in the fairy tale who wished for magic shoes to dance in, and when she got them, she couldn't stop.