There’s a light on the wall that keeps track of my breath from a watch on my wrist that rests on my chest.
There’s the sound of a truck rolling steadily west with a newborn baby inside.
There’s a puff of white smoke that keeps disappearing just above our old house where a young boy could play.
There’s a mark on the pavement where a car started spinning and a marker where someone may lay.
There’s a light in the road, small on the horizon, between I and they who may find...
Another boy’s chest rising just slightly west of our house if their light grows in time.
Rising and falling, writhing and calling, a noise and then nothing at all...
When a new light defines a heart beating in time from the shadows cast on my wall.
Do you ever remember catching your breath? Did you dream again that you drown?
Could you fall back asleep or will you always be waiting for that westerly tire-hum sound?
The first time I saw a mountain, I painted a very poor picture of it. And I did the same with waves on the beach and rocks in the desert. For the past dozen years or so, I’ve done a lot of driving sans destination, eager to leave home in search of new experiences along the roadside so I can record them as best I know how. Painting has been the validator of each of these spontaneous trips cross-country and justification of my emulated artist persona. I have convinced myself that the act of painting, the decision to put marks on a canvas rather than putting a photograph on the internet, is more artful than the artifact. The finished product is only proof of the process, never the end goal. But the leftovers…these inadequate reproductions of each great adventure…have always kept my trajectories round trips.
So, when the last corner of dashboard is covered in wet paint, and the backseat is full of colored rectangles and turpentine smells, I turn the car around and bring my pictures back to Indiana. So I can show them to you, I guess? So I can convince myself I could be anywhere, even though I never stay gone for long. I leave and I paint and I come home again.
