The second half of the year started off with the worst and best thing that can happen to my art. My computers were stolen, along with it were 5 years of work and the luxury of working on the go. This unfortunate event gave me a fresh start. My plans of doing a large scale work on the street captured by time lapse had to be put on hold, as my camera was taken too.

This set back allowed me to breath a new life into my art. I was so stuck in the graphic/figurative world that I wasn’t able to make strides of improvement. This is where the challenge was reset. I started out reading and immersing myself in the works of Mark Braunias and Sue WIlliams. I looked up to Mark and was astounded how he can paint with ease and simplicity. I learned that he had more than thirty years of practice to be able to do what he does now. With his works in mind, I began to destroy my characters. Sue on the other hand got me to lift my heavy hand to do gestural brush marks. Early in the second half of the year, I was destroying figures and mark making. These two activities were strangers to me.

As the weeks and months went by, drawings of distorted Mickey Mouse characters slowly turned into stencils and mark making led me to explore spray paint. At this point, I did research on camouflage patterns, Sarah Bagshaw, Gerard Stricher, Katharina Groose, Yago Hortal, and Matt Dowman. I filtered what I could use in progressing my exploration of materials and marks. Squiggly blobs, character stencils, rotating brushes, electronically powered rotations, masking, marker drawings, and fluid brush strokes were practiced numerously. When I was ready, they were put together to produce four final works.

This new process is valuable. I felt like it was my first time to draw. What I lost at the start of the year, I regained at the end of it. I am happy with my final works and I will pursue combining the unknown with skills that I am quite comfortable with. I have to always find the edge that satisfies curiosity in my work. I believe that will give me longevity in my own practice.