“You see so much,” said artist Luis Serrano. I looked at him, annoyed, and asked him what he was talking about. “It’s my hand, holding a flashlight,” I said. “Isn’t that what you see too?” 

I had just met Luis, as we were part of a small group of  artists invited to a 6 week residency in Maine. I watched him draw and paint outdoors, and he showed me his amazing portfolio of detailed landscapes. What felt like hundreds of drawings and paintings, dedicated to his subject and his style. He was incredibly focused and certain of what he wanted to do as an artist. I, on the other hand, had no clue what I wanted to do.  

This was a recurring problem in my young art career. It was actually a problem that had plagued me since my youth, when my mother gave me the title “glorified xerox machine.” It was a  loving title meant to make me feel good about being able to “copy” things I see. But it served to reinforce the already nagging self perception that I was an artist who had no original ideas. But only could copy what I  saw.  

So I spent my youth copying pictures of my favorite athletes. Eric Dickerson, Steve Garvey, and Magic Johnson…to name a few. The athlete was my muse. And then I went to art school, discovered the old masters, and copied them. First it was Rembrandt, then Velazquez. I had a short Vermeer phase, then got interested in contemporary artists like Jim Dine, Lucian Freud, and Richard Diebenkorn. I always did a pretty good job of making my work look like these great artists, but I always felt guilty that I hadn’t developed an original style.  

I graduated Art Center and started showing my work in galleries. People seemed to like it and I sold a lot.  But I never felt great about it. Always felt I was chasing rather than leading.  And gradually my work went from phase to phase, to eventually “phased out” of the art scene. 

Back to Luis and the flashlight. My first week in the residency was frustrating. Luis was outside drawing nature like his life depended on it. Another artist was preparing 8 foot canvases to create a new body of work. And the other 2 were just as confident about what they were doing. I went from painting a tree, to painting a figure model then a small watercolor of the harbor. And then one day, completely out of ideas, I just grabbed a flashlight, turned it on, stuck out my hand, and started painting.  

 When Luis told me “you see so much” what he meant was that I look at my hand, and see what only I can see.  Veins rising and squiggling like worms, casting soft blue shadows, subtle turns in the knuckles and stiff tendons. It’s still just a hand. But he would paint it differently. Because he sees it differently. The concept is trite I know, but for some reason it never occurred to me that no matter what I draw or paint, what I copy, it comes out of me. It’s my interpretation, and my marks that are made. And that’s actually enough to make it original.  Luis’ comment and the conversation that ensued really took a load off me. It freed me up to enjoy painting whatever I wanted for those remaining 5 weeks in Maine. It also allowed me to look back on all my copying when I was young and throughout art school and consider it not only “ok” but actually good. A vital part of the pathway to where I am now.  

When I first started working at Judson Studios in 2004, I got a visit from my mother. She was curious about my new job, and I gave her a tour of the historic Los Angeles property. It culminated in a visit to the design room, where I had just recently started doing some design work. There were probably fifty drawings in various styles at various stages of development. My mom pointed to a large black and white drawing of a monk, in a stiff neo-gothic style with sharp features and very stylized linework. “I like that one, when did you do it?,” she said. Shocked, I looked at her and said “how did you know I did that?” Of all those drawings up there, that was the only one that was mine. And it looked nothing like anything I’d ever done before. She laughed and said “I know your work. It doesn’t matter what it is. Those are your marks…”

We all have a mark. And our marks are always changing, always developing, and always becoming more “our own.” On this website I feature a quote by Robert Henri from his classic, The Art Spirit. He writes “Nature reveals to him, and, seeing and feeling intensely he paints, and whether he wills it or not each brush stroke is an exact record of such as he was at the exact moment the stroke was.”  We are all unique individuals with unique experiences that inform our marks. It may be  a simple and unoriginal thought, but I remind myself of it every day.

…..read more about me here…..