Movement

 Movement is really a complex thing. I think about stillness a lot in contrast to it. Because, just as there is life and death there is also stillness and movement. These things are extremely present in my work (I am being reminded). I think about how often my works or the things that I make are more artifacts of events, forces, or actions. I think this argument could be made about painting and drawing in general. Yet, since I am trying to find ways to play with what painting and drawing can be for me, I am asking myself to question and reevaluate the basics. In all fairness any painter could say that their paintings are artifacts of the process. Because I am using materials from specific places, I feel like I have to double down on the fact that these things are artifacts of the world around me. 

The valleys are silent testaments that the river has carved away the material that was there before. The soil in our backyard is the makeup of the grinding teeth of glacial slides, and the underwater life that lived here before that. No matter how tame the world around us seems, it is always the same mother that breathes fire to create new land and sends her rains and frost to gnaw it away. These forces are the actions and what is left are there artifacts. Even these events are constantly working, changing the landscape around us.

This is the moment I hope to try and catch. Just today on my lunch break I was reading a Joseph Campbell book. In it he mentioned that at no point in the whole universe is there a truly still point. This reminder filled me with the feeling that all H.P. Lovecraft stories try to stir within us. Our stillness is relative to what we observe. We can truly never come to rest. That is, outside of death, and even then, perhaps there is no stillness as our energy reaches its tendrils out into the living material around us.