Sam Kinison once told Norm Macdonald there are only two ways to write a joke. You take something ordinary, cornflakes for example, and inflate it until it seems enormously important. Or you take something genuinely important and drag it down to nothing. Kinison preferred the second.
I find myself bouncing between those two ideas whenever I paint.
For fourteen years I've been an inconsistent watercolorist. There is something deeply romantic about taking a small piece of God's creation and giving it a little more time than it was ever meant to have. I could spend pages assigning symbolism to every brushstroke, but the truth is it isn't that deep.
I don't have a grand artistic manifesto. I wasn't struck by lightning with inspiration. Lately I've been simply doing the work to find the spark.
This is a peach.
That's all it ever was.
Somewhere along the way it ripened, sat in a bowl, and was eaten without much ceremony. That's the natural order of things. But for a few hours it sat on my desk catching the light just right, and for whatever reason I thought, “That deserves to stay.”
Art doesn't always have to solve a problem or carry the weight of the world. Sometimes it's just paying close enough attention to ordinary things that they become extraordinary for a little while.
So today I take the Seinfeld approach. I make a mountain out of a molehill. I make a peach into an event. And somewhere in the process I remember why I wanted to paint in the first place.