Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, Blog One

"This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund."

I’ve been working on ideas supported by a State Arts Board grant, and after a fair amount of thrashing around, I think I’ve found an interesting way forward.

The work has led me back to some older, unresolved pieces that have been wandering around my studio for several years. They began as unstretched, unprimed canvases, works I found compelling at the time but never fully brought to resolution. For a long while, they remained in that suspended state, neither abandoned nor complete.

The grant project has centered on incorporating objects, sticks, stones, and shells into my paintings. I had made a few pieces along those lines before, and I was curious to see where that impulse might lead. What interests me most is the idea of disruption, using objects, shapes, and processes to interrupt the body of the painting, sometimes subtly, sometimes more forcefully.

But the disruption is not only visual. It also changes the act of making. What happens when a stone or a stick is fixed to the surface? How does that alter the way I move through the painting? How does it shift my relationship to the work and, in turn, its meaning? That question has become central for me.

Another important part of my studio practice over the past several years has been the daily drawings. I’ve made hundreds of them, improvisational line drawings that wander, search, and accumulate. At some point I began to recognize a connection between those drawings and these folded canvas, object-based works. That realization has opened a door. What had seemed like separate bodies of activity now feel related, part of the same language, part of the same inquiry.

This feels like the beginning of something rather than a conclusion, which is probably the right place to be.