..

Although I began painting two years ago, I have been making art since I was young. Over that time, I cultivated the necessary confidence to pursue inspiration as it appears. It starts blurry. It squirms. Most times, whatever idea inspiration deposits into your brain begins cliche. Yet, leaning on years of experience, I know that six months and 200 hours from now, the process of creation will have justified the effort. Most of the time, cliche ideas, like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree, just need a little love.

Before this painting existed, I was struck with an image of a man in a tub. No thoughts or meaning around it. Just a mental picture. As the idea steeped, it took on flavor. Setting, mood, and time all marinate an idea like ingredients in a stew.

COVID hit my home state of North Carolina in mid-March of 2019. When the tubbed man appeared in my consciousness, it was the third week of quarantine. I was exiting the *oh fun – working from home – only gonna have a few weeks of this so might as well not work out and eat a stick of salami a day* phase. As the everyday-life-routine I had built over years melted away, I regressed. Suddenly, my room was laced with laundry and Dominos was ringing my doorbell in the daylight. One month into pandemic, fatter and sadder and drunk, I thought about the man in the tub. Now, he was smoking. Maybe even drinking too.

…

For me, meaning is found in mulling. As an idea festers, it reveals more about the inspiration’s identity. As it takes on more umph, it is important to examine why it takes on what it does. The mind warps ideas like old memories, protectively editing and superimposing so that it may sit more comfortably in its owner’s head. Inspiration is similarly perverted by the mind. A person can’t help but contort an idea with their mind’s most intimate inner-workings.

As this painting reverberated in my head, I peeled back its layers to see the man locked behind a bathroom door, receding into warm bathwater. Despite lying in his own tub, he wears clothes like a crab in its shell. Vices clutched. Desperate to loosen his tether to reality, he looks for a mental and physical escape, like larvae preparing to be enveloped by cocoon.

As the COVID goalposts pushed ever backward, I, like many others, adjusted. Air squats on the kitchen tile began to feel a little less asinine. Painting reconnected me to the energy of creation.

Next to the tub, a Camille plant appeared in a pot. Green shoots outstretched over damp soil. The man by its side, tending to it the same way I had been to his image. In the following weeks, quarantine became a rebirth. An opportunity to prune negative habits like a Fiskar armed gardener. And so, the painting became rebirth. After all, how many lives began in bathwater? And in that position, but maybe that’s not worth pointing out…