The Middle Country

We spend our whole lives in the middle of things.

There is always something bigger than us, and always something smaller. We are never at the top of existence, nor at the bottom. The only place any of us ever actually lives is right here, in the middle of it all.

I first found that idea in Alan Watts, and it has never left me.

These paintings are made from the middle too. Each one begins with a loose, accidental ground, half accident and half intention, made somewhere in the middle where the paint and I meet. I set things going, but I don't fully control them. The painting arrives somewhere between what I intended and what the paint decided.

Out of those grounds comes a country. A glowing, uncertain landscape, somewhere between the real and the imagined, where the things that matter most to me live. The figures and the cockatoos who fill it are my family, painted over and over, finding their way through it together.

The Middle Country is not a place you can drive to. But I think you have been there. Everyone has stood somewhere between holding on and letting go, between the life they planned and the one that arrived.

That is the country these paintings come from.

Bring your own middle to it.