Good things take time | An Artist's Life

I am turning 43 years old this week, and I have been asking myself about the theme of this video, what is on my heart and mind, and what I want to say about this turn around the sun. I guess what comes up is, good things take time. If you follow me on Instagram or anywhere else, you might notice that my work has changed quite a bit in the last few years, and that's pretty typical of me. I am definitely a creature of change, and this change feels a little bit different actually. Instead of a change that is brought about by some kind of external circumstance, this one really feels more like a returning, like a coming back to myself and reacquainting myself with this creative voice that used to be really quite strong in me. Over the decades of growing up and becoming an adult and all of that stuff, I sometimes feel like I lost touch with it a little bit. My other main creative practice that is totally new is creating these tutorials. This is almost the polar opposite of the space I go into when I'm oil painting. The whole purpose of these is to be captured and broken into a process that people can understand and follow and be inspired by, and I find that both of these creative processes living together in a day or in a week is very enriching. The contrast and balance that they give each other has really opened up something in my own creative life, and I think that in an interesting way they sort of inform one another even though they seem so different. I very rarely film my oil painting process, and that is partially because it is so non-linear, and I think sometimes that it doesn't really want to be filmed, and I don't know if that makes sense to any other artists out there, but some things very much are calling to be captured, and other things for me are very much not. More often than not, I will get quite far into an oil painting, and it will look like it is becoming something, and then I will break it all the way down to this kind of cloudy, ephemeral situation, almost completely undoing all the work that I've done in a day, but not quite. And sometimes I wonder if I am not just a little bit insane for doing this over and over again. It has been just such a joy and a pleasure to be creating these videos consistently, and hearing from you guys, and hearing your comments, and what you have going on, and that is a part of my week that I cherish, and has been giving me so much inspiration. So I just want to say thank you so much for being here. It truly means the world to me. I am about to go off on vacation with my partner. We're going to his family reunion in St. Louis, so I look forward to getting away and getting offline for just a moment, but I'm also really excited to come back and kind of continue creating these expressions, and watercolors, and oil paintings, and all sorts of stuff. So I am wishing you a wonderful midsummer, and I will talk to you again soon.