Message in a Bottle

In the long run, there’s nothing better for your creative process than a session of automatic drawing! No matter what idea pops into your head—no matter how cliché or unsatisfying it may be—just draw it. An upside-down bottle whose cap has just “popped,” spilling its liquid and releasing a small group of people in the middle of nowhere. When I was sketching, I didn’t have a specific plan, and it didn’t become any clearer when I painted the piece. To this day, I still don’t know how to interpret this painting. So I just focus on how it makes me feel. For example, the tiny size of the figures set against a gigantic, nearly empty universe makes me feel dizzy. While the giant hands open the bottle, the miniature figures have no control over what’s happening around them. Some rush headlong into the unknown, while others delay the inevitable inside the bottle. Analyze it however you like—I’m just improvising! Sometimes I also simply embrace the idea of interrupting a scenario that has nothing to do with me. We try to guess the story behind this single image, which is really just a tiny piece of the puzzle of a much larger universe. That’s the painter’s luxury compared to the writer’s. You don’t always need to know the whole novel to understand a single scene.