Creation

“In high school, my first girlfriend was a writer,” remembers Wallace. “She gave me a hand-sewn leather journal, embossed with my initials, that I could refill with blank books. I still have it. I started writing – silly stuff, high school stuff, about love and heartache.”

Daily, Wallace would note down his thoughts and reflections. At around the same time, he began reading poetry. “I was reading people like Kahlil Gibran and William Carlos Williams – and every time I would read a poem, I would see a painting. I would write and find myself compelled to create.”

Decades later, Wallace continues to write daily, and his writings often inspire his paintings. “I keep a couple of journals – a day to day one, and one which I fill with sketches and notes – thoughts and fragments that seed an idea. Words that trigger a memory, which triggers an idea, which triggers an image that just compels me to paint. I jot down a few things and quickly it fleshes out into something much bigger. I’ve got about 30 years of journals filled with seeds from which my paintings grew.

By the time Wallace comes to put brush to a fresh canvas, he has a composition in his mind, and pages of notes and sketches that he’s formed around a central thought. “But when I’m in the process of painting, it’s like a meditation. The peripheral stuff disappears, the planning, and it’s just me and the paint – I’m totally locked into what I’m doing, and then it’s there– that thought, distilled, in the painting. The actualization of a thought or feeling. Everything I do is about the creative process of understanding.”

In the next few posts, we’ll continue to explore the artist’s process, and will reveal some of the writings and images that have led toward his recent work.