My braces are obvious, positioning me to be effective. Disability is not the subject of my art but my limitations have influenced my method of painting, upward in construction into the greater latices of support, family circles, community and extended fellowship. All art exists in a relational azimuth between the heavenly body, our place in position to it, and often to the friend standing next to us as we orient ourselves.
I hear it in the chorus at Love City Love, see it on the dance floor in our connecting ribbons, in the ocean with the fish looking up. We come to the table for the joyful arks, the islands along the way and spaces in between. It is the same everywhere the universe, all things in relation to another. The canvas stretches out before us, individuals with agency, as a whole, from side to side in profiles, across the table and above, out of our cups onto the surface in a constellation.
Paintings often progress to a public setting where ten people accomplish it together. Benefiting from diversity, counter point and anomaly, we are each pouring different areas, creating places where we meet and have to negotiate intuitively. In the give and overlap, we see how our influence interacts with what others are doing. Looking at the evolving composition creates a sense of collaboration and neighborliness which goes hand-in-hand with democracy and compromise.
The table brings us round in a threshold occasion, meeting in a moment of ecstasis, moving away from our standing as one thing to become another. As we empathiize and understand it, we become it. We have a propensity to see significance and are compelled to describe our experience. To describe it is to be with it further. In these unions we know that what we see is being seen. We are all phenomenal manifestations of the will of life, and that consciousness is one in all of us, giving us assurance to further expand the grounds of our understandings. If we can see the bodies and actions involved in this medium, then we can build goals for the arc of our story, even effect its direction.