"Xizhou Market Street", Oil, 9" x 9", 2009
Painted in Xizhou, Yunnan Province, China

I like to talk about my process.  I think a lot of women do.  Its often how we get to understanding.  Men are different.  When they talk, it’s often to express the certainty of a solution--not the baffling uncertainties of the process.  It’s frequently the end of the conversion not the beginning and therefore a boring conversation strategy.  Some of my guy artist friends assume when I talk about my process that: 1) I am asking for advice or worse, asking for permission; or 2) I am really a troubled person.    When a guy artist friend told me recently that he hoped I found what I was looking for soon, I decided I was making him seriously uncomfortable and had better shut up—at least about the process stuff.

A lot of people appear to be phobic about uncertainty or at least phobic about expressing it and there’s a good reason—most people feel validated when they are given the opportunity to give advice and expressing uncertainty is a really big green light.  So if you express uncertainty, you are asking for it.  But I find expressing certainty inevitably leads to its opposite as soon as I express it—so I have to be careful.

It says in the Bible to not let the left hand know what the right hand is doing.  Its supposed to be about alms and hypocrisy.  But I think it’s also a psychological truth about certainty and uncertainty: if you try to express convictions in words, you will inevitably be a hypocrit.  So its better to express it in deeds and not tell anybody what you are doing.   And more important, don’t tell yourself what you are doing – just ride on that certainty that the inner voice is, after all, the ticket holder.