Doldrums of Spectacle

I have felt as though I have been asleep for two years.  I kept painting the whole time I was asleep. In a vain attempt to try to awaken I painted whatever came out, I can’t seem to find a connection or common ailment tying them together. The work seems to be vibrant and pale at the same time, blurry around the edges because I cannot see past them and remember or understand what they are doing. I suppose they are sitting and waiting almost like watching bread bake, never fast enough. I feel like I fell in a hole and found a way out but it is uphill I am stumbling as I walk, but I am walking and didn’t stop. Your body keeps going and going until you fall of the parade float and spend your whole life trying to chase it back down, but panic turns to emptiness and wonder. Something is off and you are never quite the same. I got that mountain women- mentality to keep on walking even when your head is falling off and being semi-blind in one eye. I am striving for a dust in the cracks kind of beauty, the dust you see on the furniture when the sunlight hits it. In the dark you don’t see it as well or anything for that matter. I didn’t know where it was going.  A wise professor said once you have to paint the pictures that seem off track to get back to the ones that are. The work is spontaneous and unpredictable and I figure out what it is trying to say later. It has a vague gist of general ranting with some Wizard of OZ thrown in. The portraits of beautiful mental states, walking through a window instead of finding a door but yet I still walk. Hope is scattered throughout the dim thunderstorms. Lightly… Everything is alive with psychedelic vibrancy and technicolored yawning. I see the way out in the clearing. It involves paintings of unknown friends. Sometimes especially at the most mundane moments, I think I have dreamed this before. Good things come out of bad things, is what the lady at the grocery store said, and some days I believe her.

Amanda J Richardson