Back in the 1970s, whenever I felt the excitement of a new idea or a new adventure, I would play my vinyl recording of Bob Dylan’s New Morning on our old turntable. Some days, I’d play it over and over, belting out “so happy just to be alive, underneath the sky of blue, on this new morning, new morning…” along with the music.  

For me, working on a new series is a bit like a gardener rotating crops. If you keep planting your tomatoes in the same place, the nutrients get drained from the soil. But if you switch it up and plant pole beans in that spot, the energy comes back to the soil. Changing my work keeps my artistic energy vigorous.

August brought record-breaking heat across the nation. Even here in coastal New England, my studio was sweltering. It was like trying to work in a sauna. Everything occurred in slow motion. My hair stuck to my face and neck. I tried splashing cold water on my face and running my giant fan full-blast. It usually does a good job, despite deafening me in the process. But this year’s heat was too much. It was time to make lemonade from lemons…

I was not painting.

I was waiting to receive some important source material for a big project I’ve been working on—more about that another day. But because of the delayed source material, I found myself going down a rabbit hole of reading, questioning, and experimenting with my paintings.

I’ve had a laser-like focus on a single project for the past two months, but then I had to hit the pause button. It’s a dangerous thing to suddenly become untethered like this—especially if you’re a reader like I am.

I found myself curled up with a pile of books in the corner of my studio—supposedly planning my next painting. And while I ruminated about water, its many faces, and the role it has played since the very beginnings of life on earth, my mind wandered to John Locke’s quest to understand the “primary qualities of an object.” What? You don’t do that too?

So now you see how dangerous a pile of books can be. Before I knew it, I was digging through old dusty volumes of Rene Descartes’ work, and thinking about Cartesian Dualism and all kinds of philosophical questions that seemed very important to answer. Poor Doug had to listen to me ramble on about these things over dinner, when I tried to explain why all this was actually me preparing for a new series of paintings.

I think of the words of science professor Robin Wall Kimmerer, “I come here to listen, to nestle in the curve of the roots in a soft hollow of pine needles, to lean my bones against the column of white pine, to turn off the voice in my head until I can hear the voices outside it: the shhh of the wind . . . and something more—something that is not me, for which we have no language”

I am a reader, and much of my work is informed by my reading — everything from Emily Dickinson and Dylan Thomas to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and Robert Macfarlane’s Underland.

In one of my favorite passages from The Sublime and the Avant Garde, Jean-François Lyotard writes:

“…the possibility of nothing happening, of words, of colours, forms or sounds not coming: of the sentence being the last, of bread not coming daily. This is the misery that the painter faces with a plastic surface, of the musician with the acoustic surface, the misery the thinker faces with a desert of thought, and so on. Not only faced with the empty canvas or the empty page, at the ‘beginning’ of the work, but every time something has to be waited for, and thus forms a question at every point of questioning, at every ‘and what now?’”

I named my first solo exhibition Waking Dreams, because that’s how I feel when I’m “in the zone” working on an art project.

As artists we need to find ways to access the unconscious. It’s similar to those moments when we are barely awake from dreaming, moments when images and memories float freely through our minds without outside control. As an artist I reach for those uncontrolled and subconscious images and sensations—like being startled awake, still feeling the terror and horror of tumbling down into a vast and deep unknown space, like Alice through the looking glass; or opening my eyes, still feeling the vague euphoria of flying freely above the world. Much of my artwork evolves from accessing these hazy half-remembered feelings.

Throughout most of our busy days we engage in task-related or task-directed thought. We solve problems, commute to work, schedule activities, keep appointments, buy groceries, pay our bills, figure out how to assemble things, read the news and make decisions. But when we let go of those everyday tasks and conscious control of our minds, we open the door to possibilities for spontaneous thought.