If I stopped making images I understand—what would I make?

What if the goal wasn’t the object, but the act of making itself? What if I tried to understand the physical nature of making—whole-body perception, a sense of aliveness in the act—rather than focusing on the object it produces?

Would the object still matter?

This isn’t quite the familiar thought experiment, “Would you make art if no one saw it?” It’s more disorienting than that. What if I didn’t see it either?

Would I still know when it was finished?

I recognize that feeling—the moment when an object is complete. It arrives as a kind of bodily resolution, a calm certainty. But is that knowing tied to visual assessment? Or does it come from the completion of the physical act, with the object as leftover evidence?

Do blind artists make art? Of course they do. The impulse to make things is ancient and animal. So how does a blind artist know when to move on? What guides them from one work to the next? What compels that continuation?

Maybe the object is a kind of waste product—a by-product of processing perception. An act of purging. A filter. A way to metabolize experience and maintain internal balance.

If that’s true, then materiality becomes secondary. Moving paint across a surface, for instance—maybe that’s less about the image and more about record-keeping. Like books you’ve read and shelved: not for rereading, but to mark where you’ve been.

If so, then perhaps the most honest creative act is to make freely and often—without imposing limits from habit or discipline. Let go of the familiar forms, the preferred media, the polished concepts. Loosen the grip. Be present with the self, and make from that NOW state.

It’s not the object that matters. It’s the objectness of the object. Its existence is important—as record, as trace—but not its content, shape, or interpretation.

Criticism, description, categorization—those belong to the past. They are not part of the present-tense act of making. To impose them too early is to disrupt the function of art-making itself: to give form to a moment, to embody a state of being.

The continuum will take care of itself.

Let the objects be judged by others.

And let me not judge them at all.