How to Make a Painting

I make paintings in order to avoid doing anything else.

I collect the time I give to painting in a vial of clear glass that I take to the lab to analyze.

The lab report indicates that I forgot to add the color orange, that often-neglected color that comes between red and yellow.

Reading the lab report, it occurs to me that I’m too tired to try to understand things I’ll never understand. Trying to understand things I’ll never understand wears me out, I’m afraid—and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in one form of pain management or another. So I give up trying to understand things and become a politically fluid, non-binary producer of paintings that keep me from doing anything else.

 My best paintings are made when I don’t know what I’m doing, and keep doing that over and over and over.

‘Candy Cigarettes’, 24” x24”, oil, acrylic, Magic Marker and tape, under construction.