I keep thinking about this. Making art, changes me. I realize that it may not be for the better–not everything I do to myself, is good for me. I don’t see why that should be different for art.

We probably understand this more instinctively with music. Whether creating, performing, or listening to it. It changes us–we know it does–that’s why we like it–and we could probably verify this, how it changes–works on us biologically. This goes for thinking–serious thinking. We think ourselves into existence, just as we make ourselves with our arts.

I thought about this as I was reading Kay Redfield Jamison’s most recent book: Fires in the Dark. I was thinking about this as I painted today, how this painting felt like that, that I was putting paint on a canvas, but painting myself. I was having fun–a funny sort of painting–that’s what this painting was: making fun of myself. Or…better… doing fun to myself.

It made the distinction more apparent to me: there’s the artifact that I’m making, and as i make it, what it is that I’m doing to myself. This is not what is usually meant by ‘expression,’ which assumes something–a thought or feeling or experience–and then, it’s expression on the canvas.

My experiences, what I’m feeling as I work–those are like weather, the conditions that bend the making this way or that, like the prevailing winds and the storms that bend the tree that stands on the dunes over Lake Michigan. The wind is not the tree, nor the storm nor the calm.

There is the painting, and there is what I have done to myself as I paint. For better or for worse.

28″x30″ Oil on Canvas