Intro

So I was jogging the other day, listening to Blood Sugar Sex Magic, and it must have been around the 3rd mile or so when my mind started to take off. It's my favorite part of the run, and it's where I do some of my better thinking. For some reason on this particular run I decided I wanted to create a painting blog. Why a blog, and why should you care? Well, I'll tell you, keeping in mind that by doing this I'm really telling me because I don't care whether or not you read this. I'd actually prefer you didn't, but hey, I'm not gonna tell you how to live your life. I really just need to defend my masculinity by claiming I use things like myspace and blogging for artistic purposes. That being said, I wanted to create a blog that had some kind of artistic intent, showing a painting in various stages, while at the same time keeping my thoughts in a place I can find them. Of all my notebooks filled with writing, I'd be lucky if I could read my own handwriting, forget about finding an interesting idea.

The whole purpose of this blog is to trace the evolution of an idea. As an artist, primarily a painter, I've always been interested in the way an idea changes and is shaped through the artistic process. So what I'll be doing here is trying to map out this whole art-making thing, begining with the original idea and hopefully ending in a finished product, accompanied by images of the works in progress (sketches, drawings, paintings, videos).

And as much as I am reluctant about letting any asshole into my work/head, if I learned anything in grad school it was that writing and talking about your work/bouncing ideas off people/getting responses is pretty healthy for the work and helps it to evolve. I also learned that I never want to live in the midwest. How's that for $40,000

So here it is, A Painter's Blog. Durer and Degas had their letters, Donald Judd wrote essays, now it's Johnny Paintbox's Blog. Welcome to the 21st century.