Doing
The questions I face most in about my stencil work are based on technical matters; some variation on “how did you do this?!” I find that people are generally familiar with stencils as a concept, but not how I'm going about executing them. I think this is an important question, because understanding the process is tightly bound with how one experiences the final work.
The concept is simple: paint passes through or around a cut pattern, filling in the negative image beneath, and forming an inverse image. It's one of the oldest practices of art known to humankind; cave painters in Neolithic Europe blew pigment around their hands against stone walls. We should not try to mystify it now, or be coy about how we do it, but some practitioners certainly try. While I use the stencil in multiple ways, I'm going to share one of my tried-and-true methods.
For me, the stencil is a meditative act. In the process of working my hands into cramped, calloused, gnarled claws where I swear the next stencil is definitely the last, I find my focus and my purpose. I draw perseverance from the moment tor the truth that I'm trying to capture, and in the process of hand-cutting to exhaustion, I honor that moment or truth. That's the only way the works are successful.