No name for this. The black vertical had been white, a semi-opaque almost irridescent. The yellow in the upper right had been coursed with blue. And the background color is actually kind of khaki. I changed it after I took this photo. The light now is yellow and slanty, and this is the best I can do till tomorrow.

Painting has to be done largely in solitude, but I find that collaboration furthers. If you think I’m making a big mistake or making ugly paintings, it’s fine to tell me. Remember, though, that sometimes we project what is inside us onto what we see. Keep that in mind. Sometimes I will ask you a question. You don’t have to pay any attention, but I’d like it if you did.

Last week A Sort of Show of my work opened at a significantly cool store in Seattle, retrofit.home, at 1419 12th Ave. on Capital Hill, between Union and Pike. The work is scattered in small groups throughout the store amongst the (new, retro-inspired, expensive) furniture, the glass art, the books on anime design, and so on. I decided to re-present older, smaller work I know is beautiful and noble, because people don’t go to furniture stores to buy serious art. This group of works is serious but bright and easy to love. Wish me luck. Better, go in there and buy big armfuls.

Above you can see an image of a pretty-recent painting called “America”. It’s about 8 feet long, about 1 foot high; it’s latex housepaint and acrylic — you can mix these, they’re both water-based — on panel. The wood I use is birch veneer supported by a wooden frame on the back. I prefer this to canvas because it’s more rigid. I do a lot of painting that is very, very wet and juicy. This means I have to lay the surface of the painting flat. If I use a stretched canvas, all that liquid paint will pool in the low spots. I don’t want that. I want it to pool where I tell it to.

This painting was titled after it was painted. I never have an idea and then illustrate it. I work into the world of the painting for as long as it takes to find its unity, and then I watch the finished work till I have a good feeling for its meaning to me. This one is called America because it’s bloody, and because something is hiding behind a door. This is political.

I’m back, after more than a year stalling because I didn’t want to learn how to do this blog thing. I find all computer things exhausting because they aren’t physically real.

I was out of the country for the month of January, traveling in Mexico. I came home with a racking cough. It forced me to lie low for the first couple of weeks of Feb. Now I’m back in my studio in Seattle. I’ve begun some larger work. I have a new theme, skirts – this was provoked by some kind of love affair with curtains beginning sometime in 2005, and then re-provoked by the purchase of an on-sale, copper-colored, flower-shaped skirt I helped my beloved friend Susan Bennerstrom buy at Prada in New York when we went there in November to see the Fra Angelico show at the Met. We only went to Prada to see the architecture (Rem Koolhaas, a Seattle fave), but the skirt nabbed us. When I say I “helped” Susan to buy it, I mean I told her I would kick her ass if she didn’t. It’s an amazing, beautiful skirt! And she got it for a song, relatively speaking. But since I started painting skirts, I went to Mexico, and now I seem to be painting blades of grass. I’ll get some photos on here next week. Blades of grass for god’s sake. How simple.