Ebb and Flow

2 July 2023

Ebb and Flow

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 June, 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This image from the other night came from a difficult sky made up of varying layers of assorted clouds. A cold front had rumbled through from the South bringing a winter chill to the afternoon and I was initially disheartened at having to face such a sky. But in the end though I worked through my fear and like what came out of it.

The sky was like a dog’s breakfast, as they say here in Australia. When I had arrived in the late afternoon, I found a thick stripe of lemon yellow squeezed in between two layers of purple clouds like a sandwich that quickly went to hell in a hand basket. But for a time, it was a wild ride and by the end I left the chilly beach in a good mood.

Like most sun-kissed afternoons on a tropical beach, both the sea and the sky can have a cool and friendly look of Prussian Blue, but at sunset it begins to make the switch towards the warmth of sunset and leans towards a Violet palette.

This can play around with a painter’s head because when I use too much Prussian Blue in the sea, I'll look up and suddenly realise that the sea is begging for more Ultramarine. Depending upon the sky it can dither like this for a while, back and forth, until the sky finally takes charge leaving the sea to meekly follow suit. OK, I think to myself, now the sea is Ultramarine Blue, until it’s not, because everything keeps changing all the time.

Unless one is a painter or an observant beachcomber, all this can be really confusing to explain, but honestly, it’s the most delicious part of Painting in front of nature. This banter in my head is a visual one, but it’s engaging like in a feisty courtship between young lovers; it’s “GO AWAY!” but then “COME BACK!” and this continual back and forth can make Painting so tormenting. 

But, as always in this Painting game, a capricious picture like this puts even more technical demands upon me if I have to quickly throw one wet colour over another because I must first ‘marry’ them on the palette like I’m some sort of high priest or something. It's this marrying of colours on the palette that will later ensure a harmonious marriage on the canvas. 

Only at the end of a session does a picture need to have a climax when it must be wrapped up in a hurry. At least that’s how I felt with this picture the other evening. Of course, I'm often asked (by civilians): “Why don’t you just paint from a photograph, or from memory?” “Why put yourself through all this emotional turmoil? Why all the melodrama?" 

In life, I'm generally not a drama queen, but at the beach in the middle of a troublesome sky, I can get a little excited and it's a good thing too because my civilian life is pretty ho-hum these days. But painting from life or a photograph is for me, a no-brainer. It’s the difference between seeing a photo of the person whom you desire and dancing with her/him. 

Anyway, I couldn't paint a picture like this from memory, either in a studio, or anywhere else. I’ve never worked from photographs though I know lots of people who do. It’s a vastly different approach to painting. With it's fluid rules and spontaneous touch, painting from nature is for me the most fun. But, hey! This large art tent is a true democracy where everyone can do it their own way. For me though, with it's fluid rules and spontaneous touch, painting from nature, or one's own memory, is the only way to go.  

When I told a friend that I was writing this book, they asked me if I would ever consider using AI. I was baffled at the question and it seemed like an equally astounding thing to ask a painter who is writing about their own work. I’m an amateur writer, but one with a lot to recount, and all of it so personal that it seems unfathomable to imagine a computer, or even a ghost writer for that matter, to stand in for me in this adventure. I mean, don’t writers write to find out what they are feeling and thinking? Ditto, for a painter? But to be fair, some do exercise these crafts expressly just to make money but isn't what I’m trying to do. I'm only after self-discovery because I don't answer to anyone else. Any anyway, if there is no ‘human voice’ how can there be authenticity? It's the one necessary ingredient because if one fakes the human voice there is no art.

Understandably, if one were calculating a scientific or medical experiment, then sure, why not use AI. I have seen examples of AI writing superb school papers that fool everyone, but what is the motive if it’s to cheat your way through your education? 

A long time ago back in New York, I was telling a friend about a woman I was seeing and about some issues we were having when he stopped me and suddenly asked: “What’s your motive in this relationship? What is it you're after? Is it friendship? Companionship? Sex? Are you looking for a wife?" he said. I was dumbfounded by the question because no one had ever asked me such a thing in my whole life. Of course, I realised a little later that it might have been any one of these things, or even all of them at once because I always bite off more than I can chew. This happened at a time when great changes were roiling my life so I took it to heart, and now, years later, I figure out my motive in any situation I'm facing. 

So, I've learned a lot since then and now my motives are clearer, especially in both this painting project and in the book I'm writing. In both, I'm only interested in how I learn more about what I’m seeing and what I’m thinking, so therefore, AI would never be an option for me. But none of all this did I tell my friend weeks ago when he broached the question. I couldn’t articulate this because in fact, I hadn’t yet written it all down to understand it, and what  I haven't yet written down, I rarely trust. 

So, anyway, something as personal as painting or writing poetry doesn’t have a ‘hit counter’ that scores points like in the music business. And though it may seem something completely outside our current zeitgeist, I'd rather be authentic than rich and famous, but that's my choice, and although I need money, I think I'm too shy for fame. 

Anyway, whether or not AI will evolve well enough to supplant poetic spontaneity in the future will still not concern me because except for spell check and google searches, I don’t use it, nor will I in the future. Although down the road, when my heart goes wonky, I'd be grateful for a Dr Robot. 

Finally, because it always begins and ends with Turner for me, one only has to look at what he did in his small watercolour sketches to imagine the endless possibilities that are still available for any kind of painter today. I cannot imagine this could ever be reproduced by a computer because this interaction can only arise from a spontaneous combustion between a painter and a motif out in Nature. It’s the ebb and flow between two living organisms, humankind and mother nature.

 

Midwives forever!

6 October 2023

Midwives forever!

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 3 October, 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Here one of four studies made a few nights ago. It was a good session, sometimes they just roll out like on their own. Because they’re small they might seem somewhat insignificant but it’s what I’m doing in this period, so I don’t over-think it, I just roll dice each night in front of the motif. What will they bring? Will I win or lose, like on a craps table in Vegas? 

Actually, there is no losing in this creative business since I’ve wised up enough to learn from every picture and each failure.

I like this study more than the other two which I don’t include here, but I like them because in them all, I feel a sense of place and time during that singular moment when I painted them. Some evenings I might feel like the mother but also the midwife too.  These pictures are proof of my own existence, both physical and spiritual from that space in time. On my best days in this life, I’d be hard pressed to show evidence that I even existed at all, but a painted image must surely proof. 

Elevated slightly up on the dunes I see everything going on. I see the last stragglers of the day who walk the beach and at that hour too, are the bathers who arrive to peel off their clothes and run down to the water’s edge jumping into the sea with, or without bathing suits. Because it’s the calfing season, these days I’m distracted by whales that breach, splashing just offshore and close enough for dogs and kids to see. Me too, I’m like the good king who, from my small perch on the dune, looks out with munificence upon all living things, animate and otherwise.

And those who share this stretch of the beach might see the same sky or perhaps even feel the same way about it, but they won’t express it the way I can. Though we may share the same exhilaration for the sea and sky at this twilight hour, but it’s me today anyway, who will affix it into eternity with a cheap canvas board from China that I buy by the box loads. And yet we all share in that brief moment the withering sky of our own mortality on this day.

I guess what I’m trying to express is that I’m increasingly attentive to the painting session as a specific instant as well as a specific place. These days, in my mind at least, I know I can be quite critical of too many paintings (and painters) because I feel that in them I don’t connect with a specific moment in place or time, so consequently, I cannot feel grounded, and because of that I’m actually nowhere. If my picture can offer anything to anyone, it’s a specific expression that’s tied to a place and time.

Yes, like some others I know, I do wish to make pictures that embody a universal aspect of Painting, something that reveals a world bigger than myself and more permanant. But I’ve come to understand that the Universal aspect of art can only manifest itself if it rises up naturally through a specific work of art. 

I wish for any picture to leave traces of where and when they were born. If a painter is lucky enough to be authentic, this will express itself effortlessly through the picture because like the snail, a painting should also leave a trace.

Van Gogh’s lime tree

6 February 2020

Van Gogh’s lime tree

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 2 February, 2019, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

The lemon and the lime trees are both in flower again. A sweet aroma wafts through the house with the slightest breeze. Nice, because my evenings at the beach are also fruitful.  

Three studies from last week. This was the first, and it's icky, yellow-green sky reminds me of the garish light in the painting of the bar in Arles which Van Gogh painted at night. He loved yellow perhaps more than any other color even long before he arrived in the blazing sunlight of Provence. Although there are hundreds of examples of the warm golden glow he employed out of doors in this bright southern landscape, there are also a few paintings wherein he pushed into the cold green side of the colour wheel like in his famous “Cafe Terrace at Night”. The warm friendly yellow he used outdoors under the magnanimous sun was in sharp contrast to this acid yellow-green he used indoors at night from gas-lit lamps. 

Gas lamps were used everywhere by the time Van Gogh painted this nocturnal exterior scene of the cafe. Paris was being electrified in the 1870’s but whether or not towns like Arles or Aix-en-Provence had them is hard to say from my small perch here in Australia. Like they say, it’s above my paygrade, and Google still isn’t as clever as she thinks she is about a lot of things. But anyway, it doesn’t matter except to note that any synthetic light affects the colour Yellow to a varying degree. It’s a very fragile colour and easily maimed by all sorts of artificial lights. But it’s even an issue for any painter using this delicate tint whether during daylight or with artificial lightbulbs. 

There are still actually a few lamps around town in London today but it's for nostalgia’s sake. Other cities too, apparently in Poland, also still have lamps for show and even a lamplighter who runs around at sunset to light them.  

They say that gas lamps are a rather white light but its hard to know what they were like in Arles when Vincent painted his pictures of both the interior and exterior of the cafe. In any event Vincent loved his yellow, sometimes often applying it thick and lusciously, like melted butter over toast. I’ve often wondered if it was a colour of redemption for him? Was it a colour that gave him hope in the face of so much earthly defeat during his daily routine?

Regarding this famous nocturnal outdoor version of the cafe, there are many theories that allude to The Last Supper. It’s an idea that’s been around the block for some time now among scholars. It has to do with Vincent’s religious beliefs and their symbolic relationships to his pictures. It’s too involved for me as I’m not an academic but it’s interesting, and why not? It’s been a long while since I’ve read his letters so I don’t remember him mentioning this remarkable idea. 

  

But all this is far cry from the small dune overlooking the Pacific Ocean whence came this small study of the glowing sky done in the natural light of dusk. It was done quickly, in about 15 minutes perhaps and was number two out of three painted that evening before the darkness stopped me. Even before finishing it, I thought to myself; “Oh my! this lurid colour reminds me of Vincent’s cafe pictures”!

Daedalus and Icarus

4 February 2020

Daedalus and Icarus

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 29 January, 2019, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I have been looking at some of the first studies at the beach and thankfully, I can see progress. The palette has lightened up radically and there is more concern towards what I’m seeing instead of how I imagine I’m feeling, simply put, less of me and more of the motif. I’m using my eyes maybe even for the very first time in my painting life. 

There is always a danger, when working from nature, that one can fall too much in love with the ‘motif’ or ‘nature’ as it were, by creating a sentimental attachment to it. So too, one can be too attached by an idea of nature instead of the real thing. Yet conversely, when one is too fixated upon one’s own self-expressive feelings, including conceptual ideas to which artists are always prone, it can also blind one front of all that nature has to offer.

In any event, for the moment, I’m throwing myself into the middle ground, for like walking a tightrope, one needs to be balanced right in the center. I try not to be too close to the ‘sentimental’ in nature, but at the same time, I’m careful not to be excessively pulled into my own fanciful sense of expressive ideation such that it is no longer a communication with the outside world. It's a delicate balance, so at least for today I try to follow Daedalus not poor Icarus. 

As Pierre Bonnard famously once proclaimed after  perhaps being too exasperated by Impressionism’s stringent focus upon the motif;

“There is so much attention put upon the motif out in nature that one can forget that there is also the attention to the canvas itself.”

This is one of those secrets of Painting, hidden in plain sight as it were, and every painter anywhere, or at anytime, has intuitively had to grapple with what he means by this. For myself, I think he expresses that a painter’s ultimate goal should always be concerned with the success or failure of the picture on its own merits and its own logic, separate from where it has been taken from. Like an infant whose umbilical cord has been cut from its mother, the picture too, once removed from its easel, should (ideally) also be an independent entity with it own autonomous raison d’être. It has to function separately from the mothership, the ‘motif’. Hence the tightrope that a painter needs to traverse while balancing between the appearance of a motif out in nature and the ongoing picture on the easel.

If one understands this there is a great possibility for success because there is this avenue running right between these two disparate ideas, a sacred kind of space unique to each artist and one that can open up their real stylistic originality. A painter finds a freedom somewhere in between these two magnetic poles.

 

My nature too, has always vacillated between a slightly rebellious nature and an obedient one in life. So when it comes to painting I'm a bit of both depending on my mood. When I started out painting I wanted to do things my own way, but I quickly discovered that there were so many things I needed to understand that I quickly felt stymied by my stubborn ignorance. So many simple things became complicated for me. How to frame an image on the canvas? What was light? What colours to use and how to mix? etc, etc... Of course the best way to learn is to just paint a lot, and fail a lot. 

But eventually those frustrating exercises led me to questions, eventually they turned me towards painters whom I admired. Both my teachers Leo Marchutz and Vincent van Gogh, (one alive, the other dead) advised me to copy the Masters. But who were they? And do I really have to do that?? I had initially rebelled, but in the end, I was humbled enough to ask for help. So I finally copied a few of the usual suspects; Cezanne, van Gogh, Turner, Kokoschka, Picasso, Michelangelo, and even Diebenkorn, but a few others at various moments too. Eventually, after making enough failures in the studio and working out in the landscape, I began to find my footing. And by that, I mean that I found my own voice; a style comprised of using brushes and certain colours. How they composed an image, however badly, was at least something of my own that led me to continue day after day, and that was enough.  

Then something marvelous happened, after all the stumbling and bumbling, bits of joy began to arrive. Much later, when I wanted to learn piano I realised that by playing the music of others was indeed how everyone learned music, whether it was Bach or BB King. I still don’t know why it’s so different in art schools today.

And yet, despite all that searching around for answers so many years ago, I still feel a certain tension each time I go out to paint at the beach in the late afternoon. That's a good thing too, because otherwise, I would easily become complaisant and my pictures would suffer terribly. So the taut tightrope is a good plan for a lazy guy like me.

Here is a study from the other night that came after a long swealtering day. There was so much humidity all afternoon that it was the talk of town and everyone seemed to have fled to the beach early. When I finally made it there in the late afternoon, I set up fast and then ran down to the sea and jumped in, skipping all the way due to the hot sand. Even at the late hour, the beach was still somewhat crowded. When I say crowded, I mean maybe a few hundred people scattered along the endless beach, this isn’t Coney Island after all. Eventually I got to work and made three studies. This was the second. Not sure if it so successful but it does have a feeling in it I like. It captured that lazy haziness of a humid summer afternoon that I imagine appears anywhere throughout the world in the summer heat. Afterwards, it was getting dark as I packed up my things and because I was hesitant to swim in the ocean at that hour, I went down to the small beach at Torakina, a tiny spot where the river meets the sea and is protected by the breakwater. Often at that hour it’s empty and I can swim naked in the dark.

 . 

Morandi’s light and brief shadow

10 October 2019

Morandi’s light and brief shadow

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 7 October, 2019, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This is a very relaxed painting, almost like a pair of stone-washed jeans. Actually, it also reminds me of the way I dress each day; a clean but rumpled white tee shirt and old jeans. 

It was the first study of three when the sky appeared as a pale Prussian Blue with a hint of lime to it. The cloudbank had peaked in pink, its usual state just before veering into a warm red. The sea below appeared almost black. I was happy because I always look for any occasion to place black and pink together when possible, but the sea and sky aren’t always so cooperative. Nonetheless I’m crazy about the Art Deco feel to these colours. The sky today looked soft like when one wears a grey cashmere jumper on a cool afternoon. 

I like it better than the other studies I made that evening. Sometimes, I just like something for the feeling I get from it and not because I think it’s particularly good, successful, or not. I am grateful for that because it separates me from an academic mindset of perfection. My primary reaction to any art is always how I connect with it through a feeling, first and foremost. From there I go off to figure it out, its assets and faults. But I don’t accept everything thing that pleases my feelings, it’s just the front door to get me into the home of the art work itself. I may just like something for a few moments, days or weeks, years even. But conversely, I might dislike something for days or months only to change my mind, because thankfully, I’m human and not an AI machine.

But to be fair, I think a lot about painting, most of the time actually. Like any vocation or sport, one exercises with great care, it’s hard to get it out of one’s mind because it’s always there behind everything. It’s like the sun overhead despite the weather. Come to think of it, it may even be like being a teenager in love. Sometimes it’s so intense that one needs a break and withdraws from it because they’ve have had too much success or failure, but they’ll always go back.

And although I can frequently think about other painters and their work depending on the moment, I generally go out to paint at the dunes with an empty mind and ready for anything. Seeing how the sky looks on one afternoon might suddenly re-kindle other images that still simmer in my imagination. Just like old flames, I don’t think we ever completely forget anything or anyone we’ve loved deeply. But do I think of other painters when working? No, never. Not even Turner, and I am glad for that. 

So curiously, seeing this dishevelled-looking sketch of a study today in my home, I see that it reminds me of my early love for Giorgio Morandi. That may be a stretch, but in so many things artistic, it's always a personal thing. There’s something in it that reminds me of the simple sensuality in some of my favorite things of his, and it reminds me of just how much Morandi’s whole oeuvre has infected my artistic sensibilities over these 60 years or so. He was one of the first painters I immediately responded to as a child. My father had lots of Art books and at least one was about Morandi. I looked with fascination at his intimate bowls and bottles and related immediately to their life-like feeling.  

Even so young, I was somehow keenly aware of his sensuous use of paint that made them real for me. In some of his intimate assemblies, the squiggly and unctuous layers of light that cast brief shadows have also managed to stick with me like an early childhood crush. These are memories, layered with mysterious feelings that possess their own flexible logic, yet at the same time they’re fixed too, because they’re firmly attached to my painting life today.  

My father was also a painter, but in a halfhearted sort of way. He had lots of talent but he also had a life of work apart from it and this kept him from the discipline of being an artist which demands a lot of time. Maybe one can have a separate life from art but I think its hard, it’s sort of like trying to keep a mistress separate from one’s wife and family. It quickly gets sticky and it never works out well, except naturally in French films.

But my father did paint wonderful portraits which adorned all the walls of his large bathroom with oil paint. He was crazy about the Italians. Piero della Francesca, Mantegna, and Masaccio were among his favourites. From the bathroom walls all these Italian noblemen of the Quatrocento silently observed the intimate goings-on of the 20th century American bathroom. It was wild, and I was amazed that he was allowed to paint so freely over all the walls. But then, my parents each had separate bathrooms, and unbeknownst to me at the time, they would also soon have separate addresses too.

So, in a picture like this, and done so far away from Bologna, I can still feel the gentle serenity of Georgio Morandi. I admit it might not be appreciated due to its unfinished look, but personally, it’s a picture I like for my own reasons even though they may change in time. But unlike his pictures of bottles and jars and cups which all live huddled together in a macro-world as if seen through a telescope, my own are made out by the open sea and under an endlessly expansive sky. The connection for me today, is through the soft light and sensual lens of Morandi.

Diary, one cloud at a time

16 November 2019

Diary, one cloud at a time

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 13 November, 2019, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Sunny and windy here today, but down south, terrible fires are consuming whole towns along the coastline below Sydney. On the news are horrific images from Batemans Bay, where the roads out of town have been cut off and people are trapped on beaches awaiting rescue from boats by sea. I feel so badly for everyone, most of whom are tourists, but also for the livestock and wildlife all caught by the indiscriminate fury of fire. But also on the news are the man-made furies that kill Iraqis and Sudanese at the moment, and I feel so disheartened at times that I cannot seem to separate all of these tragedies. Sometimes, they all just bunch up in me like a traffic jam. But here, on the North Coast, there is open sunny space everywhere, and the peaceful beach keeps many of us sane and hopefully grateful.

This image was painted the other evening and strangely it even looks like a sky full of smoke from a fire nearby but it isn't. 

I see now just how comfortable I’ve become working on such a small scale, because at this hour everything changes quickly and I’m forced to keep up with it. But I’ve also discovered that it suits my anxious nature. When I have too much time to think while working, I can falter easily. So maybe this process is what brings out my best qualities. 

It's taken me years to get this about myself, and yet it's always been so obvious. I'm a jittery kind of guy, so naturally I just paint quickly. 'No drama Obama', as some of us still affectionally like to put it. But anyway, for any painter, it's an important insight because it's the difference between running at 33rpm and 45. Actually, don't we all need to find our own pace in this crazy world? 

As I was working it, I sensed its form was something that I knew and liked intimately. That sounds like a cliché I'm sure, but not all pictures make me feel the same way. Some are new and fresh images that take me by surprise, while others remind me of all the dreadful ones. Still others, remind me of my favourites.

But this one has a familiar look to it that feels like I’ve always known it. This doesn't happen too frequently so it’s a great pleasure and very special, it's as if I’ve bitten into my very own Madeleine biscuit from Paris. 

It's a compact picture and held together tightly as if constructed from an idea already built deep inside me and arose up from my memory banks. Like I imagine for everyone else, I seem to be just a giant hard drive made up of billions of images and texts. Some people during their lifetime try to make sense of it all. Others don't. We get one life and if we're lucky enough to live in a free country, what we do of it is our own business. The artist, I think, attempts to create some order out of that task and the result might be more or less what we call art. But we all do it in different ways and degrees. Creating anything in life requires choices and decisions, and whether we like it or not, these in turn always create the form of the art. And isn't that form not just how we communicate with ourselves but others too? 

I'm not a writer but I did begin trying make sense of my own life when I began a diary. It's not art but how I chose to understand myself. But like most amateurs in this, I had to learn how to express myself and that means actually learning to write because language is the form. 

It was daunting to begin writing about myself. I had tried a few times previously in my life but failed to ignite anything durable. For me it was like trying to build a fire in the wilderness with nothing just one stick and a few bits of straw. But one afternoon on the deck of a ship on its way from Ancona to Athens back in January 1986, I tried again more seriously and with more desperation this time around. On a deck chair with winter white clouds streaming overhead and a hangover, I found the courage to begin anew, one sentence and one cloud at a time. Surprisingly, I've managed to keep it going all these years.

But I'm loyal to my roots because my diary still begins with a weather report. Is it raining or is it clear? Is it hot or humid? What are the insects doing? And are the birds awake yet? Are they singing or complaining? But of my favourite creatures in the sky, I'll always ask the page if there are clouds above. Snd if so, what are they getting up to? So, no surprise that forty years later they've become stars of the show in this Painting series o the North Coast of New South Wales, Australia. 

From the very beginning of this writing experiment, these observations helped to ground me instantly into the moment. I mean, what could be easier than just watching the sky? After I became used to this routine, it became a ritual something I looked forward to each day. This then allowed me to gently tiptoe into my feelings and thoughts about the days (and nights) with less overt self-consciousness. Eventually, just like a river at its source, it began flowing.  

Cut to the chase, all these observations helped teach me to write because I never learned to grasp the nuts and bolts necessary enough to build an idea. Was I too anxious or too lazy to say what I needed to express? As a creative act, it's vastly different than painting a picture but both crucially need an attention to the task at hand and the discipline to see it through to its finish. I obviously didn't possess any of this but I didn't also in almost all other areas of my life (but that's a long story).

First of all, I had to admit that I was a ‘crap’ writer, as they say in both Britain, and here in Australia. But thankfully, it was the diary that helped me over the years stumble into a sentence and help me make sense of my thinking. 

Being an anxious type of American, I had never possessed enough composure nor the discipline to put an idea together coherently. Then, after moving to France and living with the French, Mon Dieu! I was forced to think and speak with more precision and cohesion. I owe that great nation any communication skills I might possess today, but ditto for social skills too. 

Throughout my life, it had always seemed impossible to ever get anything right, so why bother even trying? At 14, I was still like a 4 year old fat with perfectionism. Was I more chronically lazy, or just afraid of hard work? 

I was impatient, but so fidgety that I was unable to sit still. My mind churned  around in circles like I was a goldfish in a bowl. In school, it dawned on me that I was different than others, and I surely I must have some kind of a socio-mental affliction. Were my teachers too afraid to break the news to me? Worst still, although I wanted to fit in like everyone else and be normal, I suspected I was not repairable. Couldn't I just find some kindly old Swiss watchmaker to fix my hands? But when you're a kid though, it's hard to organise this. 

True confessions, I'm also a college dropout. With few exceptions, I rarely made it past the first drafts of a mid-term paper, and the few I did manage to finish were pretty crumby. Despite all my ‘inspiration’, and ‘big ideas’, I just couldn’t get my pen to paper long enough to build a sentence.

Though I've always read a lot, I had not yet fallen in love with the simple sentence. That would be like a painter who enjoys painting but doesn't care about colour. Basically, I just couldn’t stomach the empty space necessary for me to sit still long enough to put small one humble word after the next. 

Later in life, I saw it from another angle, it was the mother of all problems; I lacked commitment to just about everything. I was like an astronaut, untethered from the mother ship and drifting uncontrollably into emptiness. But all this changed when I began to investigate myself through facing my diary each day. So thankfully, I’ve learned a little about writing since then, but a lot more about myself. And just by looking more carefully at pictures, after I began starting painting years earlier, I also began reading more books with more care after getting the writing bug. This is how I waded into the world of literature, but like many of these small painting that may never hang upon foreign walls, neither will my diary ever be read by a foreigner. It's a workbook not a final exam.  

But in the end I’m not really a writer, I’m a painter. If I were a writer I'd be writing all the time, writing short stories and novels and whatnot. But I’m an amateur so I don't. What I wanted to express is that just as painting has taught me to look and see, writing has taught me to listen, inside and out.

As a painter I understand that any picture has been constructed through an abstract arrangement between the eyes and the hands, similar, say to baseball pitchers, and ditto for tennis players. But there is so much more than that because somewhere in the body and mind, are creative juices that pulsate through the cognitive marshland of memory and turns them into an electrical current running throughout the system. This is the alchemical part of any creative process and many call this arrangement a spiritual one. I'm open to anything but I do know that it cane never be an academic process and cannot be spelled out on an intellectual blackboard. One has to just learn all this either from stumbling over one sentence or just one cloud at a time.