I am working on this 84″ x 42″ diptych. Two 42″ x 42″ panels. Acrylic on wood.

I play. I play with paint, I play with words, I play with sounds. I try to capture something… that’s what I do. I just live, really, and I try to document the details.

When I can let go of the expectation of a product… when I can not think about impressing someone, but just be there, in that moment, expressing that thing… that’s when I feel like I do what I do.

I like to be surprised. I think it takes bravery to just be there and maybe do something unexpected. Without needing to impress anyone. Without needing to please or appeal to anyone.

But I don’t always have that bravery.

I don’t like things to be too perfect or contrived. I don’t want pottery to be too smooth or “pretty”. I don’t want photographs to be too posed. I want to see the imperfections. I want to see the human touch.

Even if this isn’t what I always do, it is what I strive for, and what I admire in art.

Today I walked along a dirt road, and I looked down at the compressed gravel. I imagined what it would look like if I threw a large pot, and then rolled it on the surface of the road. In an area without many larger pebbles. I wonder what it would do in the kiln? How would the glaze collect on the texture from the road, and whatever gravel might stick…

That’s where my mind went today.

A couple of weeks ago, I photographed lichen on an ancient rock face along a river near my house, and I wondered if you could make a glaze that looked like that.

I think about pottery a lot, but I am not a potter. Not yet, anyway.

I had an old box of slides in my garage, but no slide projector. This past week, I tried putting the slides on my Lightbox and shooting them with my phone.

My Dad shot these pictures of me by our house in Liberia when during my senior year of high school.

My first day at GRSBM, September 1979.

Today we went downtown Grand Marais, to Harbor Park, where chalk and disinfecting wipes were left out.

This morning I finally realized that it was the invention of photography that opened the door to modern art.

Photography meant that art was no longer needed to create images of the world. This freed painters to create abstract images of self expression without representing objects or scenes.

Reporting physical facts was no longer the primary function of art.

Watercolor, gouache and ink on paper.