I came across an artist I quite like the other day, Gerry Bergstein, from Boston. Let me show you a painting:

I love this mass of scribbles and shapes, looming and disintegrating at the same time. It’s monstrous and daunting, but it’s also held together with tape, and in the cracks and the holes there’s nothing but black space.

This is meant to be eight feet wide, so it loses something along the way – look closely at the bottom left corner and you will see this small figure.

The painting is called ‘What shall I paint today?’, and there is the painter, standing before this enormous mess, raising the empty canvas to the fragmented and sketchy vision that’s in his head. The idea is there, compelling, powerful, but until it’s realised it is a fragile, barely formed tangle. It could be blown away forever at the slightest distraction.
It’s a beautiful portrayal of the creative process, the gap between the conception of an idea and its delivery, that waiting time while our brains work out how to express what it is they have imagined. I love it, because I seem to spend most of my life in that gap.

You can see more of Mr Bergstein’s remarkable paintings here.