Why I do what I do

A week or so ago I mentioned having to be a bit away from the studio due to a big report, my third year review, a-state-of-the-artist-teacher sort of deal which MUST be turned in tomorrow (!!!!). Of course I've saved the hardest task for last--writing about why I do what I do in the studio. So, in a moment of supreme stuck-ness, I'm tackling a bowl of winter minestrone AND posting some of what I've got here. I'll add more later when I've sorted it out. Until then...

My work’s conceptual framework
In Fall 2006, I began my current position well in the midst of redefining my studio approach to painting. A year and a half earlier, having completed the first serious body of paintings post-graduate school, I confronted the necessity of newly defining basic questions like, “How do I make a painting?”, “What does it mean to make a painting NOW?” and “How do I expand my conception of what a painting IS?”
To back up slightly in order to give context, such questions ground my painting practice, and have since Fall 1998 (my first semester of graduate school) when I realized my conception of painting at the time, heavily defined and influenced by my education of course, was of little interest to me. Faced with the decision of giving up painting altogether if indeed painting fit into the narrow constraints I’d carried into graduate school, I set about a course of studio action now integral to my work as a painter—I simply stopped making paintings in the way I’d been making them (oil paint on canvas) and I switched to working with acrylic paint on paper. The simple material changes were not the result of mere media boredom, but of a consuming realization--I needed to essentially re-construct my understanding of how to make…..

Hmmmmm.