On measuring a year

It's that time of year when I frantically try to finish paintings and reflect on my creative life over the past 12 months. I'm not sure why, but I often feel as though I need to hit a certain number, as if there's a quota required to call myself a "real artist." On some level, I appreciate the self-imposed pressure. It keeps me making art. On another level, I know that counting isn't really what I've been thinking about this year. For the most part, what comes to mind are the things that I believe inspire a creative life.

There was a long stretch of time where I made a big slow breakfast for my partner on Saturday mornings: eggs, avocado, bacon, blueberry pancakes, coffee for him, and matcha for me. Music would be playing while we'd sit at the table, talk, and draw in our sketchbook. Nothing was scheduled. Nothing had to get done. Those mornings were some of the most intentional hours I spent all year, and none of them produced anything I felt inspired to count.

I started writing more, too. Not in the Julia Cameron sense, though I'll admit she was onto something with those morning pages. My version is looser. I tend to write whenever, for however long feels right, and I don't make myself do it. Somehow I've quietly kept it up. I've also been reading again. Byung-Chul Han's The Disappearance of Rituals, also returning to Agnes Martin's Writings, and Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass. Kimmerer is the one I keep coming back to. She's a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and she writes about plants with the precision of a scientist and the attention of a poet. Some of her sentences read like poems to me. She holds our dark history alongside a kind of hopefulness for the future that I don't know how to describe except to say it feels earned. I've been doing personal writing after every chapter, which is slower than reading normally, but I think it's the way she wants to be read. I'm not sure if she intended for me to cry at the end of each chapter, but I suppose I should share that too. Basically, Braiding Sweetgrass really is that good.

Although studio mornings were infrequent, I remember many of them very clearly. They were early, and quiet, with some kind of tea in hand, standing in front of whatever unfinished paintings were up on the walls. I'd imagine twelve different next moves for each one, like which collage element goes in, which areas get painted over, where a new color might land, and what to leave alone. Most of those moves never happened, but imagining possibilities was its own kind of work, and honestly, its own kind of writing. Looking really is that important.

Those are some of the rhythms, but I want to specify that I don’t think living with intentionality is always quiet moments looking and reading. This year, my partner and I went on a few bigger trips (Ireland, London, and Washington), but also explored at home– Laguna Beach days, hikes at Griffith, and Jurassic Park Live at the Hollywood Bowl in the summer, and LA Phil concerts, Vidiots movie nights, and the Jinkx and DeLa Holiday Show at The Dolby in the winter. LA offers us so much.

All of these things come to mind when I think about last year, and the moments I felt most present... which brings me back to my paintings. I finished seven of them in 2025. I'm not going to pretend the number doesn't matter to me, because it does. I often wish I had more time for my art-making practice, but I've started to think of the archive of paintings completed in a year less as a score and more as evidence. They're evidence that I showed up in the studio enough times this year to make seven things. They're evidence of where some of my attention went. The rest of my attention went to slow breakfasts, books, hikes, trips, dinners, and mornings spent standing in front of a painting trying to see it clearly. None of that shows up on the website, but it was the year, and it is the work.

I still have one more day before 2026, and a studio full of wet, in-progress paintings. Maybe I'll finish another one or two. If not, they'll be waiting for me.

Either way, next week I'll be photographing finished paintings and updating the website with a lot of gratitude for how I got to spend the year.

Kevin