“I like working abstractly, or trying new experimental methods just to see what happens, because it helps me just… get paint on the paper. It helps me explore.
“… More than just letting go of control, the goal was almost to activate a loss of control at times, and then ride the wave and see where it took me.
“Little paintings … are great, because if I screw it up I don’t care. That’ allows for a lot of room to play.”
Stephen Berry, Summer Art Experiments
It’s not wasting paint, nor paper, nor time, nor opportunity. It’s using paint and paper and time to explore the unpredictable and unexpected, to let the materials lead you.
Knowing exactly how something is going to turn out is desirable when baking a cake. In painting the process can be more than enough of a reward in itself. A pleasing end result might happen, or it might not; that’s another chapter in the story.
