"Storm Hell's Backbone", Oil, 9" x 9"

When I was living in Boston I went to Filenes and bought a winter coat.  I loved the coat—it was long and sleek, gray wool with two rows of buttons down the front—and it was warm.  When I got home, I modeled it for one of my housemates, who said it looked like a 1940’s army coat.  Then I hated the coat because that wasn’t the image I had of myself. This is called “reframing,” a psychological term used by the guys who developed neuro-linguistic programming.  But their objective is therapeutic—to turn bad experiences into good ones by creating a new context in which to view an experience.  Politicians use reframing for negative purposes—to turn good qualities of their opponents into loathsome ones.

The same thing happened when I took a group of paintings to be critiqued by an older experienced painter.  He dismissed some of the paintings I loved with contempt.  He loved some of the paintings I hated.  But the reframe only worked in turning good experiences into bad, not the other way around.  I can’t bring to life the paintings that he loved but that I hate—they will always seem dead to me, the past, not the future.  But some of the ones that I love, the ones that represent the future that I am still reasoning with, are more fragile, and it was pretty easy to end up feeling ashamed for my lack of skills and lapses in decision making.  The fact that they represented joyful steps in my progress didn’t enter into it—they were now dogs to be burned.

There is always a risk in asking for a critique.  There is the part that wants to know the honest truth--what the expert thinks--the part that knows a reality check is in order.  But the expert says, "do not, under any circumstances, paint for the market," so then I have to be careful not to take the expert's judgments as the word of god and fall into the very trap that he advises against.

The problem with outdoor painting, I write to him, is that there is a natural "high" from the experience and that feeling is transferred into the painting, whether or not the painting is any good on its own.  Painting outside has proven to me that at least a big measure of the joy and inspiration of painting comes because of the open air and the beauty of natural light.  So the big issue, the one I am always pondering, is how to protect the positive feelings that are the basis of motivation from the cold hard assessment of the end product.  

It is almost winter.  It rains a lot here.  I decide to clean my studio and confront my piles of never-to-be-framed paintings.  I get a newsletter from Rebecca Ross of the Composed Domain.  She says “clearing creates a resonance which allows disturbed energy to return to a state of balance.”  I remember the paintings that I had a friend take to the dump that ended up on his wall. I take the utility knife out of the drawer.