Gratitude

This whole Bluto project came into being very organically. I decided to give myself a year in the studio doing whatever I wanted to do each and every day. it wasn’t about coming up with a concept and executing it, it wasn’t about being critical before during and after... it was just about making what I wanted to make, for me. I made mistakes,  I came up with some very unsophisticated solutions and I learned that I was pretty talented, and I learned to own that….

 It turned out to be an opportunity for me to learn how to paint and to learn how to believe in myself on a whole deeper level, to believe that I am enough. It didn’t matter that I didnt go to the right school and that I never properly learned how to paint, I had amazing teachers in Minnesota who got me started and I continued learning rules and technique by trial and error over the course if my 40 year career.  On the Bluto work I was just painting the way I wanted to paint, with no formula to follow.  I’ve looked at a lot of paintings and I’ve seen a lot of styles that I like and I’ve felt a lot of particular painters hands in their work, and I wanted my paintings to look very handmade like they’re a record of the time that they were made, a record of their own making. And they were about Bluto but they weren’t about Bluto.  My childhood fascination with that cartoon character was a motivator but then using my adult faculties and going back and watching the cartoons I realized there was a lot more going on in them then I might’ve been aware of as a kid, one particularly fascinating aspect of it was the constant flipping of the good guy bad guy role, Both Popeye and Bluto are very versatile. This helped drive home the point that we are all capable of good and bad and very few of us are 100% one way or another. So it was a very productive two years,  it allowed me to fully and deeply forgive myself, to finally believe that I truly am enough .... and once you’ve forgiven yourself it becomes a lot easier to forgive others. Unburdening myself of all the resentments I had been accumulating and carrying around was a really nice gift to myself…thanks Bluto for Helping me learn that…..