On crowded rooms and blank spaces.

I have been neglecting a blog. I never thought I would find myself in such a place I felt I must force myself to write, urge myself forward. I with my endless thought, stream of consciousness way of narrating my own existence. The hesitation was, perhaps, my desire to always wait until ideas spilled forth and words fell from my tongue; all the more while I sacrifice the boundless capacity found in the act of pouring. Limiting my own infinity and letting it fall prey to the world of lines, sticks, and bones. Letting my own resonance go unheard. Soon I will allow the maddening spiral in which I dwell, thrive, exist to run dry at the roots. I cannot continue like this.

We are, before all things, beginners. Stumbling into an accidental discussion—the smell of oranges penetrating my olfactory sphere—I found all staring at a blank canvas upon an even barer wall. I realized I was awakening once more to my own identity as an observer, a listener, a seeker of things. All that could be of seemingly nothing before my eyes in words and three dimension. The white square was skin and world and windows and beginnings. It was simultaneously not yet being and ceasing to be. Nothing and everything. We were seeing.

Sarah Sands.

The repetition of the sounds within her name brought with it the continuity and mess of all things. She posed the question 'what is it to see?' How much time do we spend looking, and when are we seeing.

Sarah began in a haze, finishing undergrad wandering to Spain. Her paintings were exactly as placed before her eyes. A series of windows revealed the act of seeing: through, into, past windows or mirrors. Realities reflected; realities seen. Yet still there existed a blur of edges and the potential motion accompanying. Soon Sands herself, now close to thirty, decided she must then go, if at all. Yale, grad school. The representational push of her work, sterile. Interest near vanished. Her labor of love, she claimed, had descended to the laborious, constant act of finishing. It was in composing, putting in time and self to a canvas, that she was moving. Experiencing. The art of experience and the experience of art in and of itself were intoxicating; she felt herself completely being just and the paintings simply were and are. Paintings are meaningless, she said; they are such that they passively sit upon walls. It was the actions themselves possessing gravity—creating and, its parallel, looking.

Some time away. A move to Indiana. She resumed painting, envious of the freedom of the explorers she taught and holding on to self-imposed rules. Her work took to a messy entanglement akin to the woods area through which she passed each day. The thickets in her memory and recorded on canvas were a nesting period; they comprised a series revealing the constancy of broken lines and the feeling of lost.

Later and her latest work grew as branches. The still forest she remembered so well was arrived at from elsewhere. The interwoven pattern of looms emerged in her paintings. Straight lines she painted as she told a story to herself. And then the phenomenon of stepping back and the continuous act of to-and-fro: walk up, paint, walk back, look, repeat. This was the connectivity of all artists.

Anyone watching the proceedings of the evening might have permitted fear to take hold of them. Ninety minutes spent on a thirty-six square inch panel and technical discussion. The intimidation of a perfect blank canvas before their eyes was too much. It is the conscious choice of the artist to exist. To settle for nothing less than being and to always begin.