I love to check things. I miss those days when we all had answering machines that we ran to first thing getting home from work. Now we run around with our phones at our chests, never missing a call. I recently moved to comment blogging just so that I would have comments to check. At work I check my email every hour. Sometimes I even check my own blog to see if it has been updated.

I've gone through a lot of phases trying to make a living with my hands. for a short period a few years ago I became a traditional chair maker. Thats right, I thought that I could set up a cabin in the woods, cut down small White Oak trees and make them into chairs. Shannon, went right along with it knowing full well that the idea would work its self out. It's not as great a leap as one might think. My great grandfather Guy Bump made chairs most of his life. For a brief period my dad, also a painter, researched making chairs. I however actually made a post and rung chair. I spent lots of time learning about traditional chair making. I went out into the woods and cut down a White Oak tree, split it into cords and shaved them down to rungs. I spent lots of money on tools and converted my studio into a wood shop. Somewhere between my brain and my hand the small detail of making the joints tight enough for someone to sit-on never translated. The chair is beautifull. It sits in my studio today but could never be sat upon without falling completely apart. I went back to painting.

We spent the weekend with Zack, Gala, and baby Ezra. Zack is a talented artist of the academic variety which was a nice change from all the crafties I hang out with here in Asheville. Gala has the most amazing talent of pulling images straight out of her mind without using reference material, something I cannot do at all. Zack has such a way of sizing things up and calling them what they are. He told me my work was "southern" which I have never associated, now I can see it. I have always wanted him to write an artists statement for me. You can see their work at www.zackandgalabent.com

My nephew Elijah turned four today. For his birthday we all went to Tarwheels Skating Rink in Swannanoah, NC. Tarwheels is an old rink set back off the main road next to a run down Harley Davison store. I have not set one idle foot inside a skating rink since the eighties and only then because I didn't have any choice in the matter. My dad booked a Christian rock concert to play and was counting on me to bring all of my two friends from high school to the show.

The rink was truly another world. I am not even going to try to explain how; suffice it to say, when we funneled through the carpeted walled portal, past the ticket window, we came to the Otherside and landed smack dab into 1974.
Someone out there please make a documentary about small town roller rinks so that I don't have to.

I have been neglecting my paintings because I've been sucked into the world of computer programming. Things are happening with the work though. The paintings that the gallery in Charlotte took to show a client are generating interest. They called today and talked to Shannon to find out if some designers could take the work out of the gallery.

My friends Zack and Gayla (www.ZackandGalabent.com) are coming to visit us this weekend. They and their baby, Ezra, are stuck in traffic between here and Knoxville. They just finished visiting our friend Chris Vorhees, who I hear is making life-sized models of his kitchen out of cardboard.

Some friends in Chicago have asked me to take part in a project which I find very interesting. They want some of us to make a container that holds whatever we want and they are going to set it free with a hot air balloon. I think I am going to make a wooden black box which will hold SOMETHING, and if you want to find out what you will need to smash the box. This ties in well with a piece I did at Artspace. It was a little cube of a room just big enough for one person to enter, black on both the outside and interior. I had a grid painting inside with a spot light on it. I was thinking about how nice it would be to build a room just to view a piece of art. I was also really in to making black boxes; I guess I still am.

I am midway through the painting on the easel and am thinking about whether or not to frame the painting lying flat (vaseline painting). People responded well to the frames on the paintings in St Louis. A painting without a frame can give a solid block feel, almost like a sculpture. For some reason my work looks fragile in a frame, slender on the edges. It gives it a real finished feel, like a period on the end of a sentence. So the question for myself is: are my paintings sculpture or are they two- dimensional scribble pads? Frames can be like an apology. I painted this weird thing that looks like something my spaz dog got a hold of and buried in the back yard, but isn’t it nicely framed?