<<Painting above – early channeling art of mine, still as of now unfinished. A favorite of my dad’s>>

January 2016 – From my journal

I believe ‘swell’ and ‘surge’ to be the appropriate words to describe the sensation of such feeling that builds up, or is conjured by brilliant creativity, expression, emotion, or passion. Good or bad, focused or unruly and uncontrollable, it needs to leak somewhere – relieving, satisfying, like…channeling the energy of it, the emotion generated can be released. Feeling everything and passing it through me, not having to hold onto and manage the causes or reasons or meanings (not having to keep them inside of me as my own and try to prevent warping or distortion, overwhelm, or the tainting of my other contents). An ironic concept to a “feeler”: keeping feelings objective. But it is in art and writing and not many other aspects of life where I have been able to do just that; feel things without paying for their consequences, without fearing to pursue their reality too far and become overly immersed in a persona or position. Because feeling does not always equal truth or logic, and keeping objective allows the experience (like a strange high almost) to remain purely psychic, experimental, and for experiences of a different kind than those applied as lessons in the scope of one’s real life. Not actionable or intention-generating (which can, in my case, mean the devastation of well-being and spell misfortune for reasons not even properly founded, but just ill-channeled).

Whether or not they like or dislike the sensation, I think everyone should experience this at least once in their life. It is powerful, stirring, and can be enlightening, or damning…like watching brilliance, dedicated endeavor of passion in action through the fails and the flights and to the final result that is more beautiful for the ‘blood cost’.

“Channeling” is something I am recognizing as a trend in my tendencies; picking up/feeling/sharing emotions, trying to control or soothe them, understand and interpret them (which is a lovely challenge, given the amount of variables and variability). And thus I often do not plan my creative outputs, and rather just…unleash what comes, and what I have been holding on to, editing what comes, shaping it and transforming not only the result but myself and understanding as well. These efforts are naturally influenced by my interests, passions, pleasures, curiosities, and attention span (as well as my artistic abilities) but I do try to keep things open to interpretation, impression, theory, projection, etc. so that viewers can mix themselves in as they look; fill in, question, try to understand. Let them learn as much or more about something in them or about themselves – as much, if not more, than they learn about me.

I imagine that if I can encourage and inspire this sort of conduit with my work – like a personal level mental/psychic collaboration for those moments, for those who really look to SEE, then it is like the work is never finished, never perfect, but always carrying further potential. It becomes new with every pair of eyes – at least a little. Never dying, always changing, evolving, shaping, inspiring, and opening eyes and minds.