Struggling for a Subject

Over the past year or two, I’ve been getting back into painting and drawing. It started with woodcuts, but I found that frustrating and moved back to painting. I’ve also been putting together digital collages in Photoshop, which is liberating mainly because of ⌘Z.

I’ve enjoyed working with textures and backgrounds on plywood panels, which I consider to have a neo-expressionist bent. Accidents abound when you are applying paint with a knife and scraping it with a squeegee until it dries and begins to peel and tear. It is an additive/subtractive process that I like to think of as “cleaning.” Wax on/wax off. Rinse and repeat. It can be meditative, but where the hell is Mr. Miyagi?

I need some guidance. And I need a subject. I’ve always struggled to find a theme, something to make a series of paintings cohesive.

Here’s an inventory of subjects I’ve explored over the last year:

• bird house/dog house/house structure
• fences/sticks
• wings/references to angels (more in the photoshop work)
• ladders
• trees
• planets
• vaguely scientific symbols like sine waves
• geometric abstractions with sci-fi aspirations
• circles, cut into the wood and circles dripped around objects
• dripped lines that are then buried and excavated

I’m always striving for a backstory or narrative in my work. Everything in the list has a symbolic meaning for me.

The themes I’m most interested in are:

• transformation
• protection
• boundaries
• harsh juxtapositions
• mortality
• networks/nodes/intersections

I also branched out into different color palettes last year, working with whites, tans, greys. I used to make everything brown, which got a little boring. I also did quite a few blue paintings.

Now I’m struggling for subject matter. New symbols. Does it matter? Do I need to find new subjects or should I continue to explore these images and themes?

Note: comments appreciated!