It all started with a dream.

I paint my dreams. Sometimes, I see clearly a location or a figure during my sleeping dreams. Other times, I’ll receive a vision of something that wants to come through me. The art I make is not for me. It’s meant for someone else to see. I never know for whom. 

On occasion, after seeing my art, people are struck speechless. I was once asked, “how will you know if you’ve made it as an artist.” The answer is that I’ve made it when my work brings tears. It has. The tears are not about me but rather about a glimpse of the truth that cuts through the viewer’s stories with a message for their essence. 

End to Silence started to take form during a session with my spiritual advisor, Carolyn Griffith. We started an exploration with a prompt I remember as “what most wants to come through you,” or maybe it was “what do you most want to paint?” I saw it. It was big, bigger than any painting I had made before. 

Almost immediately, my thinking brain began producing reasons why I could not make such a large painting. The size of threshold doors, the cost of materials, the audacity of making work of that scale. Little did I know that I already had everything I needed. Gifts of inspiration past were waiting for me a few weeks later.

After my vision with Carolyn, I went into resistance and spin. I broke out spreadsheets and my calculator and started doing the maths to make a painting like this happen. Every head-solution produced a result that I could just not make this painting. The cost, the size, my budget, and other things that didn’t really follow logic were all barriers thrown up to block my path. 

I was scared. I was scared to let this one come through me. As I’m writing this, I’m still scared when thinking back to that moment. There is a vast backlog of imagery still waiting to come through me. I’m scared.

My coach, Katie Hendricks, had given me a “homeplay” assignment a few weeks prior that included “when you start shaking, shake more” and “record what the voices say when you reach your limit when painting.” These bits of homework were to counter the experience I’d had of my whole body shaking when the torrent of imagery wants to come through me, and I feel like I’ll burst if I let it through. After an hour or two of painting, my whole body starts to shake. Her advice was to “just do that more.” I did. 

What I discovered was that I already had the panels I needed. I had one blank panel and two crappy paintings on the same size panel from 2009. I’d been storing them for a decade, and I finally learned why. I brought them all to the studio, primed over them with white paint, and screwed them together with long drywall screws. I hefted it up onto the wall, and boom - panel-math problem solved. 

The next gift came in the paint. I had a few old cans of Rustoleum enamel paint from my old days of painting in an abstract style. I love using the Rustoleum black paint to outline figures because it has a thick body and an almost metallic sheen. I had half a can of that, some blue, and some off-white. 

Later, while painting, I desperately needed some kind of warm color. I found some orange tractor paint I had bought to paint a steel “I” beam in my studio but never used. It was the perfect gift at the perfect time. Before I set out, I knew I needed black, white, and blue. Needing a warm color was a surprise—a surprise I welcomed.

Having spent the previous month buying video gear and learning to live-stream my painting process on Twitch, I was ready to record this session. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I’ve developed a habit of live streaming whenever I paint. It’s a gift that I was recording this time – even if the audio didn’t record.

This painting just flowed out of me. I started with a big blue streak that had been haunting my dreams, and then I just let go. I was on autopilot. I had access to the hundreds of hours I’ve spent over the last seven months learning portrait painting in different mediums like oil, acrylic, watercolor, and digital with Procreate. It was all data accessible to me while I was in flow. 

I’ve made abstract figurative paintings before, but never with the baked-in knowledge that I had with me when painting this one. The face just emerged. Starting with eyes is something that I’m always drawn to, and now I know even more about the anatomy of the eye and how to trick our brains into seeing an eye instead of just marks on a board.

It wasn’t long before I knew I needed a warm color. I got that orange tractor paint out of my cabinet and wrested it open. I got so excited seeing the bright orange color that I poured a bunch on the floor. Nothing to do but cover it in rags, for now. That orange made it pop. I mixed a skin tone and then brought in that bright orange profile line I’ve been using in my digital Procreate portraits. 

It felt really good for everything to be coming together in one painting. By this point, it feels like my whole body is shaking. IDK if it’s from the paint fumes or the energy that is coming through me, or both. I’m not thinking. I’m just flowing. I reach a point and think that I’m done.

Then I head back and put a bit of white paint on the mouth. That looks really good. It’s done. When I go to sign the painting, my brain can’t remember how to make the letter “J.” That whole part of my brain was shut off. It took me a few tries to get it right.

This was a breakthrough piece for me—the start of many more.

-J

Photos of the Painting Process

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