Connect What is your favorite type of art to create?

I love trying to make art that is living. Not a fully realized executed plan that is completed, but an open ended creation that needs a viewer to be seen; like a cloud. I interact, create and discover a painting over 3-4 months. Marking the paper slowly, tens of thousands of times, takes the ultimate control out of my hands, allowing me to unravel a natural process like erosion. But an erosion with an intrinsic goal of creating something beautiful that relies on the viewer's imagination to be.

Where do you find inspiration?

I've always loved clouds, interacting with their semi-static, slowly changing softness is a life long pleasure. It is also a lifelong aspiration of mine to capture their living nature on a still piece of art. One can't paint a photo of a cloud and capture the dynamism, they and their viewer change in time. So I try to paint something living, using a process that combines billions of chaotic actions with millions of controlled ones, back and forth, over a few months, discovering the unexpected.

What would you do with $25,000?

From 2016 to 2023 a friend and I completed a 80 page, 4000 word, 36 illustration children's story, a format foreign to the publisher's world. It would be understandably risky and very expensive to publish. This $25,000 would allow us to print a 1000 or 3000 high quality, vibrantly colored books, maybe more. We could afford to donate half and sell, at a reasonable price, the other. And if people found it worthy maybe a publisher would notice. Illustrations can be seen at www.jeffstratford.org.