Still haven’t found what I’m looking for

Goosewing Beach, Little Compton 48x48

As I’m making my way through the six paintings about water, I can see some evolution in my style, my approach to the painting, and the results. I’m getting more confident, looser with the brush handling, more willing to take chances and push the color. Still, I worry. What is my work supposed to be? What’s in its DNA that will eventually be manifested somehow? Can I force that to happen by sheer will or perseverance?
I used to worry about making it new, making it different, making it surprising and fresh and astonishing. I really did. I think that was one of the things that paralyzed me years ago, the implicit pressure to produce art that no one had ever seen before, that broke new ground, that shocked or offended or poked fun or demanded your full attention. I looked at a great deal of art like that, and some of it I liked a lot. Some of it I didn’t; there seemed to be a lot of art that required the audience to follow an intricate path through the artist’s semiotic language and history and interior life and obsessions and knowledge – that can be wonderful, if the destination is worth my trouble, and there is, indeed, a path. Too often that’s not the case. I don’t like to disparage other artists’ work, because I know how difficult it is to work every day to create something with substance and meaning and heft. But some art is just bewildering or dull. Difficult art can be wonderful, even deliberately opaque and hermetic art, if there’s a reason for it. I admit, I can’t always tell, but that’s sometimes just because I don’t want to give it the time.
I can do MFA-speak when I have to. Whenever we’re all together in New York I take my kids to the Dia Beacon, in the little Hudson Valley town where my husband grew up and my mother-in-law still lives, and try to explain Robert Ryman and Sol Lewitt and Donald Judd, all of whom I love, to the teenagers, who really want to understand. But I have my guilty pleasures. I love paint. Dripping, messy, exuberant paint. And I love the illusion of natural space created by the messy dripping paint. I know, it’s been done since the Renaissance. But I think that places me on a noble continuum, and I can live with that.
I don’t know where this is going, finally. I find that frustrating and exciting at the same time. Evolution is slow. I just have to accept that, and keep going, confident that I’ll get where I’m going, wherever that is. I don’t care anymore about making it new or astonishing. I just care about making it authentic, which is harder, in some ways.