I’ve been painting for longer than I’ve been writing about Transformative Creativity, and the two are more connected than I understood for a long time. The paintings came first. The framework came later. In a lot of ways, my art practice was doing the work of the methodology before I had language for any of it.

What you’ll see here is mixed media: acrylic with paper, collage, found materials, old books, maps, house paint, drywall mud, charcoal dust and whatever else ends up on the canvas. I paint the way I think, in layers and with a lot of revision and with the understanding that the mess is where the good stuff lives. The minute I put a paintbrush in my hand everything gets tight and precise, which is the opposite of what I’m going for, so I use sponges, sticks, scrapers, trowels and occasionally branches from the neighbor’s shrubs.

Painting is the purest creative thing I do. There’s no audience while I’m doing it, no algorithm, no strategy. Nothing to optimize, nobody to perform for. It’s just me and a canvas and the question of whether I love what I’m looking at. Everything else I do gets tangled up in outcomes and metrics and whether it’s going to amount to something. The art doesn’t carry any of that. The art is just mine.