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I'm a painter.
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I make large-scale figurative paintings,
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which means I paint people
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like this.
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But I'm here tonight to tell you
about something personal
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that changed my work and my perspective.
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It's something we all go through,
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and my hope is that my experience
may be helpful to somebody.
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To give you some background on me,
I grew up the youngest of eight,
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yes, eight kids in my family.
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I have six older brothers and a sister.
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To give you a sense of what that's like,
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when my family went on vacation,
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we had a bus.
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(Laughter)
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My supermom would drive us all over town
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to our various after school activities,
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not in the bus.
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We had a regular car too.
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She would take me to art classes,
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and not just one or two.
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She took me to every available art class
from when I was eight to 16,
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because that's all I wanted to do.
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She even took a class with me
in New York City.
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Now, being the youngest of eight,
I learned a few survival skills.
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Rule number one: don't let your
big brother see you do anything stupid.
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So I learned to be quiet and neat
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and careful to follow the rules
and stay in line.
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But painting was where I made the rules.
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That was my private world.
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By 14, I knew I really wanted
to be an artist.
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My big plan was to be a waitress
to support my painting.
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So I continued honing my skills.
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I went to graduate school
and I got an MFA,
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and at my first solo show,
my brother asked me,
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"What do all these red dots
mean next to the paintings?"
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Nobody was more surprised than me.
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The red dots meant
that the paintings were sold
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and that I'd be able to pay my rent
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with painting.
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Now, my apartment had
four electrical outlets,
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and I couldn't use a microwave
and a toaster at the same time,
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but still, I could pay my rent.
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So I was very happy.
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Here's a painting from back
around that time.
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I needed it to be
as realistic as possible.
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It had to be specific and believable.
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This was the place where I
was isolated and in total control.
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Since then, I've made a career
of painting people in water.
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Bathtubs and showers were
the perfect enclosed environment.
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It was intimate and private,
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and water was this complicated challenge
that kept me busy for a decade.
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I made about 200 of these paintings,
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some of them six to eight feet,
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like this one.
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For this painting, I mixed flour in
with the bathwater to make it cloudy
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and I floated cooking oil on the surface
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and stuck a girl in it,
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and when I lit it up,
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it was so beautiful
I couldn't wait to paint it.
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I was driven by this kind of
impulsive curiosity,
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always looking for something new to add:
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vinyl, steam, glass.
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I once put all this vaseline
in my head and hair
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just to see what that would look like.
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Don't do that.
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(Laughter)
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So it was going well.
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I was finding my way.
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I was eager and motivated
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and surrounded by artists,
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always going to openings and events.
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I was having some success and recognition
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and I moved into an apartment
with more than four outlets.
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My mom and I would stay up
very late talking about
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our latest ideas and inspiring each other.
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She made beautiful pottery.
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I have a friend named Bo
who made this painting
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of his wife and I dancing by the ocean,
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and he called it "The Light Years."
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I asked him what that meant, and he said,
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"Well that's when you've stepped
into adulthood, you're no longer a child,
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but you're not yet weighed down
by the responsibilities of life."
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That was it. It was the light years.
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On October 8, 2011,
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the light years came to an end.
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My mom was diagnosed with lung cancer.
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It had spread to her bones
and it was in her brain.
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When she told me this, I fell to my knees.
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I totally lost it.
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And when I got myself together
and I looked at her,
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I realized, this isn't about me. This is
about figuring out how to help her.
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My father is a doctor,
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and so we had a great advantage
having him in charge,
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and he did a beautiful job
taking care of her.
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But I too wanted to do
everything I could to help,
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so I wanted to try everything.
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We all did.
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I researched alternative medicines,
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diets, juicing, acupuncture.
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Finally, I asked her,
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"Is this what you want me to do?"
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And she said, "No."
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She said, "Pace yourself.
I'm going to need you later."
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She knew what was happening,
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and she knew what the doctors
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and the experts
and the Internet didn't know:
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how she wanted to go through this.
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I just needed to ask her.
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I realized that if I tried to fix it,
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I would miss it.
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So I just started to be with her,
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whatever that meant
and whatever situation came up,
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just really listen to her.
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If before I was resisting,
then now I was surrendering,
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giving up trying to control
the uncontrollable
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and just being there in it with her.
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Time slowed down,
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and the date was irrelevant.
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We developed a routine.
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Early each morning I would crawl
into bed with her and sleep with her.
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My brother would come for breakfast
and we'd be so glad to hear
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his car coming up the driveway.
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So I'd help her up and take both her hands
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and help her walk to the kitchen.
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She had this huge mug she made
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she loved to drink her coffee out of,
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and she loved Irish soda bed
for breakfast.
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Afterwards was the shower,
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and she loved this part.
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She loved the warm water,
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so I made this as indulgent
as I could, like a spa.
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My sister would help sometimes.
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We had warm towels
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and slippers ready immediately
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so she never got cold for a second.
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I'd blow-dry her hair.
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My brothers would come in the evenings
and bring their kids,
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and that was the highlight of her day.
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Over time, we started to use a wheelchair,
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and she didn't want to eat so much,
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and she used the tiniest little teacup
we could find to drink her coffee.
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I couldn't support her myself anymore,
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so we hired an aid to help me
with the showers.
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These simple daily activities
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became our sacred ritual,
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and we repeated them day after day
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as the cancer grew.
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It was humbling and painful
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and exactly where I wanted to be.
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We called this time "the beautiful awful."
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She died on October 26, 2012.
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It was a year and three weeks
after her diagnosis.
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She was gone.
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My brothers, sister, and father and I
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all came together in this supportive
and attentive way.
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It was as though our whole family
dynamic and all our established rules
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vanished and we were just
all together in this unknown,
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feeling the same thing
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and taking care of each other.
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I'm so grateful for them.
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As someone who spends most
of my time alone in a studio working,
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I had no idea that this kind of connection
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could be so important, so healing.
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This was the most important thing.
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It was what I always wanted.
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So after the funeral, it was time
for me to go back to my studio.
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So I packed up my car
and I drove back to Brooklyn,
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and painting is what I've always done,
so that's what I did.
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And here's what happened.
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It's like a release of everything
that was unraveling in me.
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That safe, very, very carefully rendered
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safe place that I created
in all my other paintings,
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it was a myth.
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It didn't work.
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And I was afraid, because
I didn't want to paint anymore.
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So I went into the woods.
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I thought, I'll try that, going outside.
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I got my paints, and I wasn't
a landscape painter,
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but I wasn't really much of
any kind of painter at all,
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so I had no attachment, no expectation,
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which allowed me to reckless and free.
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I actually left one of these wet paintings
outside overnight next to a light
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in the woods.
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By the morning it was lacquered with bugs.
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But I didn't care. It didn't matter.
It didn't matter.
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I took all these paintings
back to my studio,
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and scraped them,
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and carved into them,
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and poured paint thinner on them,
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put more paint on top, drew on them.
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I had no plan,
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but I was watching what was happening.
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This is the one with all the bugs in it.
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I wasn't trying to represent a real space.
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It was the chaos and the imperfections
that were fascinating me,
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and something started to happen.
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I got curious again.
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This is another one from the woods.
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There was a caveat, now, though.
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I couldn't be controlling
the paint like I used to.
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It had to be about implying
and suggesting,
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not explaining or describing,
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and that imperfect, chaotic,
turbulent surface
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is what told the story.
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I started to be as curious
as I was when I was a student.
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So the next thing was I wanted
to put figures in these paintings,
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people,
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and I loved this new environment,
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so I wanted to have both
people and this atmosphere.
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When the idea hit me of how to do this,
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I got kind of nauseous and dizzy,
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which is really just adrenaline, probably,
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but for me it's a really good sign,
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and so now I want to show you
what I've been working on.
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It's something I haven't shown yet,
and it's like a preview, I guess,
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of my upcoming show,
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what I have so far.
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Expansive space
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instead of the isolated bathtub.
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I'm going outside instead of inside.
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Loosening control,
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savoring the imperfections,
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allowing the imperfections.
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And in that imperfection,
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you can find a vulnerability.
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I could feel my deepest intention,
what matters most to me,
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that human connection
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that can happen in a space
where there's no resisting or controlling.
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I want to make paintings about that.
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So here's what I learned.
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We're all going to have
big losses in our lives,
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maybe a job or a career,
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relationships, love, our youth.
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We're going to lose our health,
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people we love.
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These kinds of losses
are out of our control.
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They're unpredictable,
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and they bring us to our knees,
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and so I say, let them.
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Fall to your knees. Be humbled.
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Let go of trying to change it
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or even wanting it to be different.
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It just is.
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And then there's space,
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and in that space feel your vulnerability,
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what matters most to you,
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your deepest intention,
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and be curious to connect
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to what and who is really here,
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awake and alive.
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It's what we all want.
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Let's take the opportunity
to find something beautiful
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in the unknown, in the unpredictable,
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and even in the awful.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)