I want to quickly address what these paintings evoke for me and why they can feel a bit anachronistic, I think. I only recently looked deeper into this feeling that I've had my entire life, that something is wrong with my visual, visual capacity, or let's say my capacity to visualize in my mind's eye. I remember when I was a kid, maybe like nine or something, my mom had bought a glass painting kit and my sibling and I were at the kitchen table painting these cups and Kasia painted something really cute, some kind of face creature, a creature with a face, a cute creature with a face, and I was just staring blankly at this cup, looking around at what I could possibly reference to paint on the cup, and I think I picked a plant, a house plant, and I painted this plant, which is such a not compelling image for a mug, especially when you're painting with this kind of translucent stained glass, but jellified color. Anyway, it was such an insignificant moment, I think, for everyone else, but for me it stayed there because over and over and over again I've been confronted with just a really, really hard time imagining anything on the spot, and it doesn't just, it's not just visual, it's, I have it around like everything, like I, this is why I spend so much time kind of working on memory and why I think these days I actually am probably really good compared to a lot of people with specific memory because I've had such a hard time remembering anything.

I, if I don't meditate, if I don't, if I don't review my day, if I don't plan my day, then all of the kinds of momentums that I've been developing could just fall away in a day. I, for me, that the rule of 20 days or even 60 days doesn't work when it comes to developing habits. I don't really develop habits. I, meditation has become somewhat automatic for me, and I shouldn't say that because meditation should never be automatic, but the sense of, like, compulsion to sit down every morning only really started after a thousand days of meditating, of doing that, of forcing myself to do that every single day without a break.

Only after a thousand did I start to do it naturally, whereas before there was, like, alarm bells and messages and, you know, like a whole, a whole scaffolding to kind of bring me back to that place and that time. So, it's really hard for me to form habits, and the habit of self has never really been consistent. The habit of, oh, these are my friends, or this is what I'm interested in, or this is what I'm doing. It's been this kind of emergent thing over, over 30 plus years of exploring and touching everything, and finally taking that time to reflect and to feel into, like, what is not self and what is self.

And this notion has become extremely important to me because it's very clear, in retrospect, what was a waste of time. And I do believe that at the time I have always done the best that I possibly could. It's just taken me a long time to reach a place where I know what I'm doing where I know what I can and cannot trust in terms of my own memory and impulses and focus and resonance. There are certain things that are not trustworthy in me, and I'm okay with that.

So, anyway, back to this kind of hazy, blurry geometry that has very much been the reason that I came back to painting, and the pivot that has happened pretty quickly in the past couple of months where it's, like, extremely clear what I need to be painting. It's because I, as a person with aphantasia, the inability to visualize, I feel I feel really comfortable and at peace in blurriness. Like, when things are blurry and it isn't forcing me to focus on something, it totally calms my nervous system. I feel comfortable with the potential of the space, and I don't feel forced to make anything of it.

There's a kind of non-subjectivity to the spaces of potential that have just enough information to kind of hint at a theme or a direction, but they don't outline anything. They're just fields of color, and there's a poetry to playing around in those fields and dreaming up whatever you want to dream. But at the end of the day, the last thing I want to do is kind of close off that space of possibility by introducing a subject again, or I should say an object again, which then infers a subject. That's how I would describe these paintings that I'm doing right now, and I don't really see them in the world, because even though there's a lot of similarity to other artists, I mean, especially like later Rothko's, obviously there's a big correlation with some of what I'm doing.

I think that where I differ, though, is the presence of brushstrokes, where I am purposely eschewing all signs of brushstrokes, because something that I really don't identify with from that modern Expressionism era, and the general canon of like Western white male artists, is that prevalence or pronunciation of the I, of like, I painted this, these are my brushstrokes, this is my signature. I'm much more aligned with the trans, with the transcendent, the luminous approach of like, as soon as I remove that need to declare that I did this, it suddenly becomes a space that's open for everyone to feel like co-creative within it. And again, that biological signal of like, when I've finally hidden all the brushstrokes, and suddenly the whole thing awakens, and the whole thing comes alive, like that to me is a sure sign that it's the right decision for me to do that. And I just love, I love this chapter of my life where arbitrariness and relativity are like, gone.

Like I spent so long in that space, and it was such a healing space in a way, because I think there was a lot of imposed conditioning that really painted out certain things. It really limited my vision, because I came in with, or let's say in my early life, I was burdened with so much conditioning that I had to go through a state of total relativity, where nothing really mattered, and everything was justifiable, and kind of mutable. And now I'm in this space of, okay, now I'm looking for absolute again, and I'm looking for truth, and I'm looking for, what can I rely on? What is not always moving?

Because I do believe that that's, I'm not alone in that, and that's kind of where, you know, there's definitely a thread through my life of transcending a lot of the kind of chaos of endless relativity. And that's an interesting visual juxtaposition where my paintings now are really blurry, but to me that's almost more absolute, because there's a sort of falsity with all of the small clarity, small-esque clarity that we have today around all these stories, all these people, all these things, but actually they're all the same story, and they're evoking something that the collective somehow needs to move through. And I want to, I want to offer something different to that. I want to offer a space where you come as you are, and then whatever isn't you just shakes off, because this space is so resonant with clarity, clarity through blurriness.

It's so interesting. I'll probably have to parse that out some more.

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