What do I want to paint?

“Cezanne seems to have hands in his eyes and eyes in his hands. When Cezanne paints a tree or an apple, he does not paint a copy of a tree or an apple, he paints its nature. He paints the whole that it is, the whole that is lost to us as we pass it, eat it, chop it down."

-Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects

Afternoon Sun, 4'x4', oil on canvas

I'm in the midst of a bit of a thesis crisis.. which isn't really a crisis at all. I am just second guessing myself and trying to figure out what I really WANT to paint. There are a lot of things I could paint, but where is the energy?

The rough draft of my thesis paper was due this week. Here are a few excerpts:

Visiting Musée de l’Orangerie, to see Monet's Water lillies:

"I remember one particular panel, in which the color of the water was painted as a vibrant yellow, and the water lilies were more abstracted than in any other. I thought, “This cannot be truly what it looked like, it doesn’t seem like a pond at all.” But I remembered back to a trip I had taken up north in Scotland, to a very secluded part of the highlands. When I woke up in the morning, around 7 am, I walked out to the edge of the loch, and witnessed the colors of the water. It was filled with dull violets and yellows, not at all the bright blue of the previous afternoon. I realized then that we have always depicted the water as blue because it reflected the sky, and that the loch at 7 am also reflects the sky though it is not blue. Monet had perceived the color of the pond to be yellow, just as I did that morning in Scotland. "

Figure and the tomato series, 16"x20", oil on canvas

"I am working with this concept of depicting life from the Bios or microcosm view in which the small subtleties between things are more important. This is very dependent on light, as it can abstract the composition, becoming more important than the figures or the tomatoes themselves. Space is also an important component of my work, as it creates relationships and narratives between figures and objects in the composition. The Zoe, the macrocosm, should not be forgotten either, because for me, it is that grand view of life that I wish to portray even in the smallness of things."