hiatus (revised)

Between sometime in 2020 and January 19, 2026, I didn’t add anything to this website. {1]  If you click on the ABOUT link, you'll see what was fresh back in mid-2020. [2]

On behalf of my official / professional artist website, I've required myself to maintain a certain facade, have not given myself permission to mention the personal here. This website implies, through its existence + format, that only one aspect of my life may be seen.

Plein air sketch, Pogonip Park, winter 2002. Charcoal and white conte crayon on pale gray paper in a handmade sketchbook. My whole orientation to making shifted around that time. Now, almost a quarter century later, it's shifting again, with a kind of rhyming intentionality to the "before times."

So on the private side of my life. during on breaks from, ummm, authorized behavior, when there are ruptures in my reality, whether large or tiny, this website would say nothing only "Here's art." It didn't gesture at, let alone unpack, any personal misalignment. Let the art do the talking? Or not.

Starting in 2021, for a couple years, I was in a crisis—a kind of a breakdown—and accidentally continuing a pandemic-led nothingness, I completely ignored this website. In fact, I declared (mostly to friends, but also to strangers and enemies) that I was done being an artist, I'd moved on.

Though I continued making work.  [3]  Which I didn't count since it wasn't work to share publicly, rather a mereness, some whatevers, made "only" for myself to investigate the crisis I was in. I also concertedly informed myself that this wasn't work at all.  [4]

Crisis. Really. This included agony but also fascination and even some delight. Maybe you won't be as surprised, as I was: When I fall apart, even as I fall apart, I grow. Breakdown came with reconstruction and emergence. Amidst that, the thread of what I thought I was supposed to be doing, the thread what and who "to be as an artist“ must be, frayed and then snapped. (Whew! Finally!)

And then, after awhile, like two or maybe three or possibly closer to four years of confusion and mess and resistance, a generative silence has blossomed in my work spaces. There is a forthcoming I wouldn't want to put into words if I even could. This is feeding me. As is the spaciousness that comes with not explaining, let alone writing a statement which would tell you how to understand it.

A blessing to not know what I’m doing or why I’m doing whatever it is, to find myself exploring in and with uncertainty in the studio. I also don't know where this work belongs. The context of galleries, commercial or non-profit, feels awkward or downright wrong right now. Nor do the current art conversations make much sense to me. All of this I find more interesting than knowing where my work belongs. 

When it's ready, the work itself will disclose where it belongs, how to get there, and what I as its maker might say about it.

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1. "Not that anyone's noticed..." was the opening line of the first version of this note. A couple of people did notice and told me so. Sweet!

2. Hindsight is 2020! LOL

3. Still unclear what an artist-who's-not-an artist would do with a body of work which skips around among materials and refinements and intentions, has no context beyond my processes or attention. It’s not work I've shared even with my close people. Maybe my sons will sort it out after I'm gone, lucky guys, this could be their souls' work! See James Hillman's The Soul's Code.

4. Deeply personal and fairly direct. Since I am a fan of sprawl and misdirection and metaphor and slant; have a high aesthetic caliber; and feel resistance about how the crisis work looks, no way would I share. My pro artist website, I get to call what's "good enough" for your eyeballs. If you want to see the backrooms stuff, you'll have to apply in person.