Seconds to Decide

There is nothing more captivating than movement to someone that pays attention to what they are looking at.

For as long as I have been drawing and painting, I can’t help but be in awe of how challenging it is to capture something if it is moving.

To draw something like a swimming gold fish or an active fire, an artist has to stop the movement. Essentially, stopping and capturing a moment in time.

That got me thinking a lot about the significance of stopping time as it relates to actions.

I don’t pretend to know a lot about neuroscience, but I have heard about studies that have shown that there are seconds between the thought of doing something and the action that follows that thought.

That is what inspired this painting. The idea that we can stop the movement towards an action. We do not have to inevitably act in a habitual way. We have some seconds to decide upon a different action.

That thought gives me hope. The things that bother me, like a habit or a pattern, I can change. 

We can decide to do something new within a few seconds. We can change.

Think about the exciting possibilities.

Can you imagine?

An Equal and Opposite Reaction

If you had a high school physics class and learned about the theories of motion, the title of this painting will sound familiar to you. Newton's third law of motion states that for every action (force) in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction. One pool ball hits another, and the reaction or result is that they push each other in opposite directions.

This physical reality and how we represent it visually was partly what inspired this painting. The other part was sort of a human equivalent, or our emotional reality. Our actions have a profound effect on the people we know and beyond, to the world around us. And conversely, we are reacting to the actions of others all the time. On both ends, we can’t seem to escape the emotional toll it takes.

I can think of many reasons that these thoughts came to mind as I worked on this painting- the loss of civility in politics; our effect on the environment; our choice of profits over treating workers with dignity; the effects of school shootings. All of these things seem to be having a huge toll on our collective emotional state.

I wish I was pointing to the answer with this painting. But I’m thinking maybe the first step is to be reminded that we are feeling. We are not just numb. We should honestly acknowledge when an action hurts. Maybe after the feelings are on the table, we can all figure out an equal and opposite reaction.