Perhaps what I wrote earlier was misleading. This was not my intention: I have wanted to offer thoughtful and generally accurate guides, but pinning down messy, complex states with a line of language has always seemed for me to be a daunting and futile task.
I feel now that I should stress a point: There is an Inner Need, a reoccurring Internal Desire, and it has torn against my insides to be freed, to course through my body and become manifest into a formed expression in the world. The tearing of this Inner Need has caused a sort of psychic torment. I’ve experienced an unbalanced force of pressure between my inner and outer realities, such that the inner pressure calls for an outer event of suitable expression to balance the difference and alleviate the torment. Some outer expression is called for, is seemingly necessitated, by this Internal Desire.
But what type of expressive manifestations are an appropriate remedy? This is not an easy problem, and finding fulfilling, or even adequate, solutions to it has consumed much of my energy. I did not start with an appreciation for an art form. Not really. I didn’t enjoy looking at paintings or photographs, or listening to music, or watching movies or reading books, so much that I said to myself, “hey that’s neat. I think I like that. I’d like to try and learn that.” I started with this burning discomfort of Inner Need acting as a driving force, pushing me on a desperate hunt to find a suitable form of expression, for the purpose of offsetting a consuming sensation of inexplicable pressure.
Maybe painting wasn’t the perfect choice. It was very frustrating for me, and I struggled with it, at times quite dramatically, throughout the entire duration of my practice. But, I didn’t know what else to do. I tried using different media. I tried using psychotropic substances. I tried engaging in various life experiences. I might have tried drilling a hole in my head if I thought it would have helped. As it happened, I did what I could to try and get through it, usually on a day-to-day or very short-term basis. I developed an art practice, both disciplined and experimental, with experiential and philosophical aspects (of a type), a certain habitual regime of intoxicant use, and fell into an uneasy balancing act with wave-like states of passion, anxiety, inspiration, frustration, relentless determination and insatiable desire.
I feel this explanation is closer to the heart of the matter, and that it would be misleading to speak of my process as an intellectual sport or an obsession I had with trying to determine meaning or something that operated in a predominately rational or coherent way. I believe that all these other elements have a place, and that I have operated by a form of logic, but that these must be understood from the perspective of this Inner Need, Internal Desire.