A few weeks before Christmas of 2021, I decided to start an under-painting on a medium sized square canvas propped up in the corner of my make shift studio my old one bedroom apartment. My boyfriend was coming over later that night to help me put up my Christmas tree and enjoy some hot chocolate while listening to Bing Crosby croon away White Christmas. Reels had just taken off on Instagram during summer of that year, and it changed the way I worked. Filming myself painting up until that point was something I had never considered and, frankly, quite intimidating. It was a task that I initially grudgingly started in order to boost my visibility online that later became a creative tool, akin to new the childish sense of a brand new box of crayons that held untapped potential. It was an instantaneous way to document the radical changes that occurred in my abstract work from that period. That night I abruptly made the decision of recording myself starting a painting, unaware it was going to evolve in a project that was going to span over two years.

At its inception, I mixed color intuitively to get as much as I could done in my allotted window of an hour and a half. A color scheme of lime green, orange, pink, and white materialized on a disposable paper pallet that still had a little space on it from my last painting study. I fumbled with my cell phone to adjust it onto a tripod, which was propped up on an office chair, selecting the time lapse feature to capture myself as I worked. I begin rapidly blending pigment directly on that square canvas with a brush the size of a standard house paint brush, while trying to forget my every move and possible mistakes were being recorded. My brain went on autopilot; adding color here and there, mixing paint wet-into-wet, the canvas surface bending under the movement of my brush. Everything knew where it fit. At the end of the filming session, I noticed white paint in my hair and some on my sweater. It was lost on me how the white liquid acrylic streaks appeared on my person in my painting induced transcendental meditation.

The painting was abandoned for a week or so after the holidays. When I got reacquainted the canvas, I basked in its desert feel streaked with bright colors mimicking a canyon sunrise. Perhaps my color choices represented my subconscious longing for warmer weather and for the the six inches of snow covering the parking lot of my building would thaw, so I could go out into the world again. I worked at a similar quick pace, occasionally setting the painting down far across the room to observe it. I sat on the floor staring at it for twenty minutes at a time, turning my head or getting up and turning the painting on its opposite side. I tried to balance the elements as best as I could with what I had. I recorded my progress as I went. Paint. Film. Stare. Paint. Film. Stare. Paint. Film. Stare. 

I liked the product after working on it for another month, but the painting still didn’t feel finished. The painting stayed tucked away in the corner of the apartment studio for a long time after, forgotten. A year or so I moved to a new house with my boyfriend where the painting followed me and continued to sit in the corner of the new studio space. Occasionally, I would muse at the painting when I went to fold laundry wondering if I should paint over it and start again. A sign from the universe presented itself when I received an invite to participate in a group art show at The Rockwall Gallery in the Wedgewood-Houston district of Nashville, with a peculiar criteria for the work submitted: It must be unfinished or abandoned work. I had the perfect candidate.

The show was called the (Un)Blank slate. It was a lovely show featuring several extraordinary beginnings. All of the works were unframed or even separated from the stretcher bars that held them draping banner-like across the brick walls of the gallery. Each work was in its own state of limbo. I knew a few of the artists and it was interesting to have a look at their process in various stages. At the time of the show’s closing, the painting and I were hitting our second anniversary together. I was struck with renewed inspiration to finish the piece. However, when I returned to the studio, we were still not communicating well. This thing still wouldn’t tell me what it wanted to be.

My process with the panting remained much the same as it began over the next few months. Paint. Stare. I did not film as much during the progression, but I did take a fair amount of photos. It morphed from green to green/brown. At one point I got so frustrated, I slashed at the canvas with a dripping red paintbrush. That was when the shift in my energy and the look of the piece changed. We were telling each other what we needed.

The color scheme of the painting changed from green/brown to blue/red/teal. As I worked more fluidly, the color became warmer. To add contrast, I added a pale yellow mask over the entire picture plane. I recognized the colors from holding works from Matisse and Richard Diebenkorn in my head from Pinterest and images search deep dives. I stared and turned a few more times while I stepped to the other side of the room. Okay. Here we are. Done.  I put my brush down.

How do you know when a painting is truly done? In many ways paintings are living breathing organisms. The change and grow the longer you keep working on them. You grow and change as you continue to work. The painting is a visual representation of that growth.