Painting

I am a visual painter, not an intellectual one.

You see something you have to have—it can be something quite small. A bit of light on a branch. Two umbrellas meeting on a city street.

You pursue every detail. You are shocked into delight at each small revelation.

Yet it is what you see that you paint. The shapes you find yourself emphasizing. The visual path through a great deal of underbrush. The underlying being: is this painting of a meadow really an explosion? Is this streak of clouds a stairway? Are the shapes actually forming a spiral? A triangle?

And when you are finished, you look back to the thing you had to have, and think, Did I get it?