I need my painting to be on a flat horizontal surface, a table or the floor. In working on mural size paintings, I paint on the floor. In my studio at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, I have a floor dominated by a very large polished concrete rectangle. That is where I have been working. It’s like painting a floor in that I have to paint strategically, to be able to paint myself off the canvas, not get trapped in a sea of wet paint. On the floor is a 10 by 18 foot piece of canvas I first had rolled out in March of 2020, then left on the floor unprimed and uncovered for 6 months and have just finished over a year later. Painting this painting has been a difficult journey through pandemic disruption.

The painting begins with the child who draws a vision of the path of artistic creation. As patriarchy lurks over the shoulder of the woman artist painting her painting, a clock ticks towards a few minutes from midnight, a shadowed figure reads a book, and a moth flutters in the light from a curtained window. I asked to be photographed between the child and death. I hope to get this painting up on the wall soon so I can roll out another giant canvas.

I always end up filling up my work table with stuff and then working on a tiny little patch that remains clear. That’s my studio table at the moment, a jumble of my basic materials, including paint, ink, medium, the stubs of brushes that I have had for over twenty years, of a quality no longer made, and palette knives no longer available that are worn to the sharpness of a razor from decades of use, and a postcard of Gustave Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio, the inspiration for the current work.

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