Your Signature...continued

"...it all started with drip paintings on the floor of my parents garage."

That signature is your personal voice or statement. It's not necessarily something you need to develop. It's evident in your work now whether you see it or not. Of course there are ways to increase that visible amount. This can be the elusive thing. We want our work to be distinctive, to have a unique style.

Some have said that if you want to be truly unique, you shouldn't look at work by other artists. Then from that place of isolation, your own personal view will emerge. That is virtually impossible.

When I was twelve or thirteen, I started producing drip paintings, using my little jars of model paint dripped onto pieces of cardboard laid out on the garage floor, letting the paint splatter and drip into abstract patterns and lines.

I've thought about those projects for many years. How did the idea for that process come to me? I have been born to this profession but I'm just not that brilliant. I seriously doubt it was a result of a cosmic, mind meld connection to the spirit of Jackson Pollack. I must have seen an ad or article or television clip about him and the way he was working. I have no such memory but I'm almost certain that the exposure occurred at some time prior to the creation of those drip paintings in my garage. Even during those years, long before the information superhighway, I was undoubtedly effected by media.

We are heavily influenced by what we see and have seen. Today, mass media imagery, and content is crushing us with tsunami force every millisecond of the day.

Let it wash over you, embrace it. You brain is a wonderful filter. Learn to trust the mainframe in your head. You've already done enough 'seeing' in your lifetime. If you never looked at another tree, you would know how to paint one. Now it's just a matter of getting all that information out onto canvas. If you embrace your experience, you can find your way through this maze and create with your own personal view.

In a future post, I will describe a working process that has allowed me to inject more of my personal handwriting or unique voice into my work. Stay tuned...