NM Paintings 2021 > Wait For It

Wait For It - Do You Read Me?
ink, acrylic, and tempera on paper
27.5" x 38"
September 2021
detail- Wait For It - Do You Read Me?
ink, acrylic, and tempera on paper
27.5" x 38"
September 2021
Wait For It - The Rest Is Silence
ink, acrylic, and tempera on paper
37" x 47"
September 2021
detail - Wait For It - The Rest Is Silence
ink, acrylic, and tempera on paper
37" x 47"
September 2021
Wait For It - Going To Dog You, Sam
ink, acrylic, and tempera on paper
38" x 27.5"
September 2021
detail - Wait For It - Going To Dog You, Sam
ink, acrylic, and tempera on paper
38" x 27.5"
September 2021
Study for Wait For It
ink, acrylic, and tempera on paper
24" x 18"
September 2021
detail - Wait For It
ink, acrylic, and tempera on paper
24" x 18"
2021

As we careen across the first decades of the 21c, it feels like our lives are outstripped by the speed at which we are fast-forwarding nano second by nano second. The sensation of standing still rings in us like vertigo and our patience is constantly expected to ‘pick up the pace’. To where? For what? How?

Technology promises to solve and absorb the ‘how’ of our progress, and it seems that perhaps the general infatuation with social media will take care of the ‘what’. Still though, it remains to be decided by each of us what will constitute the ‘where’ – not necessarily as an endpoint accomplishment but certainly as a significant marker of some sort. ‘Hurry up and wait’ is out of the question unless one is to be consigned to the dullest forms of existence. Acquiescence is considered no less than total surrender.

Trimmed to a purpose and timed by the continual sweep of the clock we are charged to keep the trajectory in our minds at all times, much like a bobsledder racing along without the possibility of peripheral vision. How to escape this track, let go of the helmet and goggles and begin to breathe again without the feeling that pure oxygen is being forced into our windpipe?

Where did the individual punctuation of our lives fly off to and who is hoarding it now, to what end?

/Full stop/ one could transcribe with the helpful person sending your telegram. /Full stop/ when it is no longer possible to read another illuminated screen at the end of the day. Isn’t it then, the full stop that we must need and be waiting for? Without rests in the musical score and without punctuation on our pages of prose when are we allowed to breathe as time blurs by?

Forget nano. Write it with a loaded brush on a clean page and don’t worry if there are drips and dots between the letters … Make it as legible to yourself as you can since undoubtedly, we never really have the time to finish …

Wait for it, otherwise you may never be ready. Wait for it, then it’s yours.