 My name is Mike Hammer and I make blob paintings and I guess I consider myself an explorer of the paint. Painting is fantastic, I teach as well and for years I poured my heart into teaching and in the last three years I've decided to take a chance with the studio, didn't know if I could cover the rent, the heat, but as soon as I moved here and took that risk things opened up. And now all I want to do is be here absolutely. I get to come in, listen to music, put paint on paintings and talk to galleries, talk to dealers, talk to clients, come up with new ideas, yeah it's a fantastic job. I grew up listening to psychedelic music from the 60s, looking at those album covers. I love music not for what it says but for how it feels and I make art in the same way just to excite you visually, to inspire you, to give you new ideas, to have you go holy, what is that? Just like that, oh my god. And I guess I've always been looking for some kind of technique that would define me. I always knew that I was looking for something and then I hit upon the blobs after being inspired by this artist Holton Rower who's like the drip poor master and that's it and now I'm just stuck on these blobs like I just want to make blobs all the time. A big part of the prep is the paint, preparing it is huge and the tricky thing is you know okay so you get a regular painter who can mix whatever pink he wants right on the spot because maybe he just needs pink over there. So he might mix a super light pink or a little bit of darker pink or a bit of a gray pink or a bit of a yellow pink. For me I need massive amounts of each quantity paint. I can't just mix it on the spot and then go because then I'll be, I'll run out. So I've kind of got to carefully choose the colors I want. So paint preparation is huge and then it's a lot of experimentation but I have an idea of where I'm going with each piece to some degree and then it develops naturally. And then I guess there's layering, do one layer at a time, it dries, keep going, keep going. So it could take anywhere from three to five or six weeks to finish a piece or seven weeks and then the top coat, then the resin. So number one, making the blobs is just more pleasurable. Like it's just, there's something pleasurable about squeezing the paint out in a circle and watching it kind of fill. You know when you see color, you don't see this pink in and of itself. You see it relative to the colors around it. This pink changes if I put this beside it versus if I put you know a different color beside it. So as I'm putting the color down, I'm perceiving instantly and I think I'm not only kind of planning it but I'm soaking it up. It's an enjoyable process to have those colors feed into my eyes and so for me just enjoying soaking up the imagery as I'm making it plus the paint going down. It's like this reciprocal process, the paint squeezing out, I'm causing it. It's cool to go blobbing out there. I have to pay attention to how much but at the same time I'm perceiving these colors flowing up into my eyes and I'm also kind of watching the whole piece and seeing it develop. My ideas don't stop. I have too many ideas. I have to filter them because if we're up to me right now at a five times this space that I have three people working on an installation, four people working on a blob cube, two other people reaching out to galleries around the world, that's my idea. That's where I want to be in five years. But then at the moment what I remind myself of is creativity comes to responding to this piece. You know we get into habits. We do things over and over and even brushing your teeth can become a habit and if you don't actually pay attention then you're not really doing it right. That's how I have to try and keep this real. These paintings is that I have to be creative in that moment and allow myself to flow with that even if it's going to take me in a weird direction and I don't know if it's going to sell or whatever. Staying in the moment, staying in the moment with the piece as opposed to just trying to recreate something I've done, I think that that's when you get into big trouble for art. I think the most important thing in art if you really want to stand out is to be original. I really do. You've got to make mistakes like they say. You've got to burn and crash and throw stuff out and make stuff that's no good and not know where you're going and leave all that behind to find something that's something that you made. You know I mean for me the blobs are the coolest thing because there's only one other guy in the world who made paintings like this and that to me is very cool. The world recognizes originality in the end and I guess the one thing I would say is it's taken me 20 years to come to this or 19 years. So patience you know like eventually I think if your heart's there I don't know I think I've spent some nights crying saying oh god you know will it ever happen is just to stick with it. I guess it's like I talk to my wife you know right now I'm driving to work and I hate it. I used to bike and I love it and you say the cycling is cool because you're outside and you're exercising but there's one more thing I've forgotten. This is I think why I like these paintings is when you're cycling you have to attend to everything. You're forced to look in front of you, behind you, beside you, listen. It's very intense. When you're driving you can just sit there and be like oh and you're not working so hard and we like to work and so when I'm on my bike I'm working all my senses and I guess that's what the blobs are like because I'm feeding the whole area, it's feeding up, feeding back down and then beyond that right so that's one piece right then there's the fact that you know I can make a blob piece that's all black and then I can do stripes on top and then I could make a giant blob cube that you can walk around like the opportunities are endless for the blobs it's like I could blob things I could blob people so it's this is the first series that I've come upon that I love the process and from my mind now the opportunities are endless and like for an artist I don't know there's nothing else right.