I’m standing in front of a large canvas stapled to the wall, it’s about 5 feet high and 6 feet wide. Big enough that I can get lost in it, for better and for worse. The sun is finally out, streaming through two small windows. The studio is long and the light tapers off as it makes it way to the wall I’m staring at. There’s paint all over my clothes, my shoes and under my fingernails, even a bit in my hair. I’m mulling over the seemingly infinite number of possible shapes and patterns and colors and gestures and lines that are possible. Listening intently, I’m trying to disentangle the messages from the painting and the criticisms from my ego.

I’m working to somehow give whatever mark makes its way to the canvas its own part to play on the stage. The weird, improvised shape I put down is talking over its neighbors, but with some luck the cacophony will at some point turn into a conversation where each stroke is at the same time unique and part of the whole. Where’s this painting going…Where’s my work going? Those are the questions I ask myself over and over. Not because I’m unhappy with the work, but because I want to understand it better. Neither of us, this weird shape and I, knows at this point where it’s all going, but we’ll get there just the same, eventually, hopefully.

So as I’m standing in front of this painting, lost, not knowing what the next move is, it’s telling me again of the things I don't know, rather than affirming what I do. Even the so-called finished paintings seem to mock my nescience. At least prior to starting this piece, I was more optimistic. I guess all artists embody a kind of cruel optimism, continually pushing forward in search of an unattainable answer.

I have to remind myself that I don’t need to know where this painting will end up—only that it's trying to answer a question I don’t know how to ask. As I’m working, I strive (clumsily) to invite a state of not knowing—as frustrating and debilitating as it can be much of the time—because that’s why I paint, why most of us paint, I gather, to better understand what we don’t know. Or maybe, more accurately, that we don’t know. And so we grapple with the not knowing, the unknown, the unknowable. Where the inevitable uncertainty and the doubt and the getting lost and the failure may well goad us into throwing our brushes at the wall, but also, if we’re paying attention, has the potential to lead us to some kind of new insight, a different perspective or an unfamiliar way of seeing things.

Often, when faced with the unknown, we may overly rely on reason or science to provide the answers. However, what they unveil is just a small fragment of a larger, entangled reality where nothing exists in isolation. Similarly, paintings aren’t self-contained, self-sustaining, individual answers, but are part of a larger question. I suspect artists know on some level that we’ll never find a complete or clear answer, yet we trudge on anyway, lost in unfamiliar terrain, doomed to fail, hopefully. Because in failure comes a new understanding. Failure allows us to run our fingers along the contours of our knowledge and the limits of how we see the world.

We don’t finish a painting because it’s been resolved simply because a painting can never be resolved. It only illuminates the next segment of a path leading towards whatever chimera we’re chasing. Like excavating a dinosaur or a lost city, each painting is a bone or a brick; by itself, it’s never a complete picture, it merely whispers in our ear, alluding to its secret that it’s only a small part of something much bigger.

We paint because it gets us closer to some sort of understanding about our shared place in the story. The path is never clear in the messy midst of creation, but every single element, whether I know it or not at the time of its inception, has its part to play. And at the end of each painting I’m looking for a spark, a glimpse of an ineffable reality. A feeling of recognition of something real, something that’s not trying to be anything but what it is, something that is at the same time me and not me. Yet, the closer I think I am to catching a glimpse of this reality, the closer I think I am to uncovering its truth, the more that reality seems to withdraw just beyond my reach. And then I start another painting.