HOSTS
WHEN I WAS ABOUT 5, I was given my first ever water color paint set, and I was utterly transfixed. I loved the little, round tablets of color, but most of all, I was fascinated by how the colors spilt out of their dishes to swirl around and merge with other neighboring colors, creating fantastical art smudges on the white tray without any help from me. I'm trying to capture that in these works, the happenstance beauty of our childhood paint sets, the vivid scream of a single, circular color with its surrounding overflow, and how I felt art 'emerging' in me with little effort of my own. But also something more visceral. I must have been taken to church around the same time and seen worshipers receiving the Eucharist because I came to assume that my paint tablets must be just like those little, circular, sacred wafers people were eating at the alter. "Hosts" they were called. My paint tablets must have God inside them, too, I decided. That's how come they can create art on their own with me just a bystander, I believed. So... trying to emulate what I'd seen at church, I chiseled the nice, deep red one out of its tray, put it on the edge of my tongue, and snarfed it. Of course, I spit the thing out seconds later, creating a small, bubbly abstract color field surrounding a wet disc of radiant red. But—Wow!— I loved it. That was my first, formative artistic experience. I embodied it. And, I confess, I'm still a believer.