Another revelation.

I am a painter. At times, I have made video and objects, and once produced a short-lived zine. I used to have a smart sounding statement. It made sense and rang true, but it was wordy. While working on a batch of watercolors and gouache this weekend, it occurred to me that all of my work is simply about troubleshooting and damage control. 

I've been without a statement on my website for some time. On one hand I want my work to be about everything. It gives me an out, an excuse, to make whatever kind of art I want, from whatever point of view I want, and explore anything, without having to rewrite the statement. After working primarily abstract, it threw me to be forced to come up with a statement about the somewhat representational work, beginning with the pools and flowers paintings, especially since they referenced a difficult time in my life. I gave up and boycotted writing a statement. I figured I deserved that break. 

In the past I have written that my work is process-based. It is. I have also written that my work is narrative. It is. But perhaps I've used the word, narrative, when the more appropriate word would be document or record, as in, a record of time spent painting, or a document of what I was processing during the course of my daily life. It is also true that the more representational works were/are narrative in the context of the traditional definition of narrative. 

As I was mindlessly working on watercolor this past weekend- totally lost in the moment of painting, because for some reason, unlike my canvas paintings, watercolor is a near trancelike activity for me- I realized that other than my uber pithy statement: I like to paint— my paintings are about troubleshooting and damage control. The mediums of watercolor, and particularly gouache, were the key in unlocking this revelation. I like watercolor. It was the first medium I started painting with, and since I had no expectations of why a watercolor painting should be difficult, it was not particularly difficult, plus at a young age, I was told I was good at it. I didn't start using gouache until much later, and again, I did not think it was a particularly difficult medium to work with either. I'm not being cavalier, I just wasn't aware of the endless frustrations these mediums cause people. This weekend, a friend mentioned that his students hate gouache because it is such an unforgiving medium. At that point I became aware in my own work, that yes, it actually is an unforgiving medium, as is watercolor. Both can get muddy in a split second, and more or less, once you lay some marks on the page, it's there to stay. Which is when I realized that in my own work, I was not just idly painting in a trancelike state of mind, but that I was actively engaged in end-to-end moments of rigorous troubleshooting and damage control.

And thus, the first paragraph above which is now my current statement. 

Thoughts?