During the mid 1990’s, I made a transition from painting in acrylic on unstretched canvas to small-scale watercolors. I began painting my small watercolors in hand bound notebooks I made using old canvases for cover material, when it became apparent that the watercolors had more in common with my written journal than with the old, much larger work on canvas. In December 2011, I decided to paint a small watercolor every day for at least a year. The purpose of the daily practice was to cultivate the fluency of a spontaneous, materially simple way of painting by fully integrating with my daily life. Hand bound notebooks soon proved impractical for daily production, and I switched to small sheets of paper, typically in the 4” x 6” to 7” x 9” range, with 5” x 7” being the most common format.
Though the daily journal wasn’t intended to be a project, it became one in a partial way, as I gradually became aware that the daily paintings were accruing collective as well as individual meaning. But the only rule has been and remains to complete a painting every day. The porosity and mutability of boundaries on all interpretive levels is a perennial underlying theme. Abstraction and representation interact freely. I haven’t missed a day since the journal began.
Background
In the summer of 1993, following a sea cliff epiphany on the Maine coast, I vowed to mend my workaholic ways. I phased out painting large acrylics on canvas and ceased seeking exhibitions. At first cultivating my ability to work small was a simple practical adaptation dictated largely by available storage space, but working small and in watercolor raised a new possibility: liberating painting from the and integrating into my life by allowing me to carry my studio in my daypack. I could paint in a motel room when traveling for work or pleasure, or sitting on a log in the woods, at a friend’s kitchen table, sitting in the Adirondack chair at the end of our yard.
Liberated from the confines of business, exhibitions, and studio, I found my way back to a depth of in-process satisfaction in making art that had been nearly extinguished by the pressures of a dual career as state government bureaucrat and exhibiting artist with adjunct teaching on the side. I was free to let painting follow the vagaries of mood and circumstance and also free to paint in nearly any circumstance, if I chose to do so. My production was sporadic, but never dormant for long. For me, painting was simply one of the basic components of a life well lived.
In the decade and a half that followed, I discovered my truest vocation and came to think of myself as a writer, of writing as my life’s work. It was clear from the beginning that painting and writing weren’t in competition; they were (and are) symbiotic in ways I only partially understand. I often feel as though the paintings act as a kind of tuning fork for my creative faculties. I don’t recall when I first recognized that the watercolors constituted a journal of sorts—it gradually became self-evident with the passage of years. But it had been on my mind in the fall of 2011 when I visited my son in Bangor, Maine. During dinner conversation one evening I remarked that the watercolors had been coming to me so easily and automatically that I thought I could do at least one every day.
“Well then, why don’t you,” he asked.
It was a casual remark in a casual conversation, but it was one of those ideas that stick in your brain like some fragment of a popular song from forty years ago that you didn’t even like that much. That question arose every time I sat down to paint, and I didn’t have an answer.
On December 21, 2011, I began with the intention of giving the daily painting practice a full year. At the end of that first year, the daily practice of painting had become so integrated into my life that stopping looked more difficult that continuing. At the time of this writing in mid-March, 2019, I haven’t missed a single day.
When, as a nineteen year old undergrad brimming over with the hippie spirit of the times (1968) I showed one of my professors a series of loose gestural drawings I had done with deep faith in the pure Zen of my naiveté. After an awkward, thoughtful pause, he said, “Those are nice—there’s only one thing you need to do in order to bring them to the next level.”
“What’s that?’
“Spend twenty years in a monastery in Japan.”
There are no shortcuts to the depths of one’s heart and mind.
A daily painting means that you paint when you’re happy, sad, busy, distracted, focused mourning, fresh, exhausted, inspired, weary, cynical, desperate, enthralled, angry, exuberant, discouraged, hopeful, etcetera. You just do it. Every day. No matter what, no matter where.
Though I had been painting for decades when the watercolor journal began as a daily practice, in a sense, it became my monastery in Japan. The daily paintings became not merely an artistic project, but a spiritual practice. With the repertoire acquired in the preceding years to serve as a language the dance of the hand and brush across the surface became like handwriting. The images arise without the limitations of ideas and strategies.
I have never tried to give the paintings an illustrative relationship to events in my life. The fundamental faith I’ve operated with is that as I become more and more attuned to the painting process its relationship with my inner life would become more and more intuitive and direct. Though that is rather an oversimplification, it is in essence what has happened.