On Slowing down and speeding up

As my practice evolves, I notice myself slowing down. This applies to many aspects of how I approach my work: the amount of time I spend looking, sketching, writing, contemplating, and in the actual painting process itself. My paintings have become more layered than ever, which means they take longer than ever (shocker, I know). I trust myself to follow where the work leads, and I'm confident that where it has taken me feels right. That being said, I've grappled with not being able to produce as many paintings as I used to.

I'm not sure exactly where that feeling comes from or what to call it. Part of it is a worthiness thing– this notion that I must create a certain amount of work to justify calling myself an artist. There's a fear that people will stop caring about what I do if I stay silent for too long. There's also a desire to find more time for my art for myself, and frustration that I can't get to it as much as I'd like.

I don't like to spend too much time focusing on the things I don't have. I'm aware that we all want more time to do the things we're passionate about. Instead, I try to identify my thoughts and feelings, understand where they're coming from, and make a plan to channel them into something that feels good– to make meaningful changes within the constraints I have. For me, this simply meant making more art.

I knew I couldn't accomplish this within my regular painting practice unless I drastically scaled down the work. I had to do something else. Something that felt separate enough to allow me to work through new ideas quickly, but that also directly informed my regular painting practice.

I started by thinking about some of the text-based paintings and drawings in my sketchbook that I was curious to explore at a larger scale. Over the course of a few months, I made about 50 paintings on paper using paint, colored pencils, markers, and charcoal. I started most of them by pouring paint onto the surface and pushing it around with random tools or with my hands. When I didn't know what to do next, I'd pour more paint onto a new surface and move it around with another weird tool. More often than not, it was plastic tubes to scrape pools of paint across the paper, but sometimes it could just be heavy body paint overloaded on the surface and pushed around like a sculptural material.

The experience of making these paintings felt completely different in my body. My regular mark-making is slow, meditative, contemplative. Shapes form slowly, and so do the layers of color. Nothing arrives quickly. If there's a gestural quality in those paintings, it's achieved through slow, methodical repetition. The text-based paintings were the opposite. I moved my hand quickly across the surface and my body followed. I added more paint when it felt risky. I pushed pools of color together without overanalyzing the consequences. I trusted my gut to know what to do, and to do it with urgency. I allowed my body to move in new ways so that I could arrive somewhere visually different.

Of the 50 or so paintings, I chose 9 to share. What drew me to those 9 was different each time. Sometimes it was a brand new process I'd stumbled into– something I hadn't planned and couldn't have predicted. Sometimes it was the words themselves that felt more striking than the color, composition, or process used to display them. But the throughline across all 9 was a fresh, quick, wonky, gestural quality. There's so much character in them. They aren't tight, planned, or finicky. They breathe. Words and letters fall wherever they may. Poured paint pools where the paint wants to collect.

One painting in the series reads "Sun Set Moon Rise," which comes from a hike I love to do in Griffith Park with my partner and with friends when they visit. I try to time it so we start hiking right before sunset, watching it fully as we climb, and reach the top as the moon rises. Depending on where you are on the mountain, you can see both happening almost at once, the sun going down on one side and the moon coming up on the other. My work is almost always about love and connection, and this theme shows up in different ways across everything I make, both obvious and subtle. This one is a reminder of that experience in nature, the people I shared it with, and the kind of intention I try to set for myself when I plan that hike.

These paintings offer something I didn't expect. They started as a response to frustration, but moving my body and hands at a faster pace, visualizing ideas quickly, following impulses without deliberating, gave me a sense of relief I didn't know I needed. A reminder that my practice doesn't have to move at one speed. Beyond the pace of making, they teach me more about color and composition, and I bring that back to the work I call "the work." The patience I've built through years of slow repetition gives me the confidence to trust my instincts when I'm working fast. It's actually all one thing, visualized differently. The goal is for both processes to keep informing and strengthening each other.

For now, I'm holding both, the slow and the fast, without needing them to merge. I'm curious to see where this parallel path leads.

More soon,
Kevin