“What Can I Find?” is a painting that sums up what artists do. We are professional observers and feelers of the world around us, trying to mine the world, twenty four hours a day, for substance for our work. We distill all that we observe and feel into the objects. I feel like I have a giant funnel on my head that allows me to take in as much as possible from my experience in the world in order to try to make sense of it and then use it in my work. I am constantly on the lookout for debris, ephemera, and objects from the past as well as making notes on thoughts, small drawings, photographs and observations to use as content for the next piece.
The writing on the painting — “See what I can find” — comes from an old postcard. “Suns rays, Winds, Precipitation” and “Color” are some of the things we find daily. The whacky little character on the bottom left holding a plant is from a child’s drawing. The person in the boat symbolizes the constant searching we all do in life. The person walking with cane at the top symbolizes time passing as does the wheel. The date, “April 12th, 2008″ is from one of my wife’s library books used for her Phd research. So these are all elements I have found and put together in the moment of making this painting as I was going through life seeing what I could find.