Living From The Heart

Image by Justin Mott

The multi modal person.

Tell me, doesn’t your painting interfere with your writing?

Quite the contrary: they love each other dearly.

They’re very different.

Very: one is painting and one is writing.

But your poems are rather hard to understand, whereas your paintings are so easy.

Easy?

Of course — you paint flowers and girls and sunsets; things that everybody understands.

I never met him.

Who?

Everybody.

e.e.cummings

Sometimes people ask me what my paintings mean. If you have to ask, they elicit nothing in you, except maybe your self doubt at not being able to “understand” art. That’s not the point though. The point is emotional. Some onlookers identify easily with the emotions depicted, and some don’t.

Because the image I chose here is representational, the emotion expressed is more accessible, no doubt. The vocabulary of an abstract piece of art registers everything from tactile qualities to color to pressure and speed of the marks, as well as to a satisfying sense of structure and scale. When someone asks what the piece means they are…