The drip is a gift that keeps on giving.

Recently we took everything out of the studio and sent it up north to be photographed, inventoried, and to start their journeys to wherever they’re going to go.

So the studio in Florida was empty except the four walls I’ve left to dry and all of this scrappy, stepped-on, splattered, mutilated paper on the floor.

Because of the almost massacre-style of throwing paint and materials on the wall, I recently started to put paper haphazardly down on the floor so I wouldn’t kill myself from slipping and sliding!

Last weekend I went into the studio, and all of the scrap started talking to me and saying, “If all things are important, what about us?”

So I ceremoniously picked it all up, threw it on the tables, and said “We’ll talk about this later!”

The next day I saw these big blobs and footprints on the paper, and thought, Hmm, this is the forgotten power.  This is the residue from battles lost, but still, spirit remains, and the power is there.

(I’m sure that hidden in corners, all kinds of things would come under the same scrutiny and nomenclature.)

I looked up big old pails that I had put brushes in and then poured in linseed oil to keep them soft, which will keep them soft for decades..  They have been lying around for many years, old and crusted paint cans with maybe an inch of something still in them.  I can’t throw anything out that has paint in it; it’s like throwing out one of your babies.

So, coming up on Easter-time, I thought about an egg hunt, finding this old junk and integrating the different things into the papers.  I found some old paints with viscosity of a real thick oil under its skin, so I started putting that on with brushes.

The first brush I pulled out was a six-inch-by-two-inch brush that had a myriad of colors trapped inside its long bristles.  So with great glee I stuck it into the old paint that I’d found and started slashing it around on the paper.

Then I married it to some other paints, I took old glue bottles that had an inch or so on the bottom, and I took the pieces that were scraps cut apart or pulled apart, and put them as collages together, either on top of other papers, or made all this serendipity helter-skelter, almost crossword-puzzle type of things on the table, happily sloshing all these colors on and all this polyurethane and linseed oil and varnishes and God knows what else.  Whatever they were, they were having lots of fun!

The next day, when I walked in, they were mocking me, saying “Look at us, you old bastard!  We’re ready for the war!  Where have you been?”

I was thrilled.  I’m also very pleased that I’m not going to be working in this particular studio for awhile, so these pieces can gestate for a number of months until I come back.

It all leads back to the realization of the drip:  how the drip has opened my mind to all kinds of other possibilities and realities of the world, and my quest for new boundaries for myself in art.

It doesn’t take much to get me excited!  I never know what’s going to happen when I kick the can over, but something’s going to come out and bite me in the ass!

Matt