like waves of a thousand afternoons

                               MJO

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 11 September, 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I am not sure if I had already put this up in this space, but here it is, in any case. 

Tonight, the sea and sky looked just like this. But sadly, I painted something different, as hard as I tried to paint this particular sky which already held a place somewhere deep in the vault of my visual memory. 

"Too often, this Painting business is such an elusive adventure!"  I thought to myself.

And yet, the truth in this painting was like a 'yellow stickie', affixed to my forehead throughout the evening in spite of my inability to render it again just as I had in this painting done one month ago. 

Though I couldn't get this right tonight, I certainly painted something else of another value, even if I wished for something different. But what pleases me, and I what I wish to express, is that the sea and sky tonight was just like the painting already done weeks ago. 

And at the risk of being pedantically redundant, this experience is the inverse of that of being in a museum in front of a painting where the picture seems so truthful that one  thinks to oneself: 

"I have seen this it! When I was on such and such a beach last year!"

In this instance, it is the beach which says:

"I have seen such a picture being made by that weird painter last month!"

It is a reassurance for a painter to feel that when there is truth in a work, it will live on (in this case) on the beach like the waves of a thousand afternoons to come.