Odd Keepers
This gallery of work is called "Odd Keepers" to acknowledge how making art has been like fishing at times. There is skill and experience to thank for a successful outing, but also some luck. A less generous way of saying this is how one of my teachers put it once when he was looking at some of my work. "Eventually something visually interesting will happen if you just keep swirling the mud". He did not mean it as a compliment.
In any case, these paintings are almost all made empirically, without much of a plan or preparatory studies, just the joy of freely creating, playing and letting different moods/motivations (whether serene or anxious) take hold of the process. The pieces are done when they, in a sense, tell you to stop adding to them. The statements they make are muted, subtle and maybe inscrutable. But together they do represent to me the reality of everyday life where money and time are limited for a working person, and ones thoughts and best plans for the future are often interrupted by exhaustion. They use mixed media and bits of trash and recycled art scrapped from other projects. They are small and do not propose a program for how to make art, instead they are silver linings: your glad to have found them in what you did, but don't forget the failures they underlie.