When I was young I fiction of superstition, magic, & the supernatural. I still do, because they remain fictions.
Legends establish credibility in an incredible way. Become a legend.
Embrace the obvious with skepticism, you never know what you will discover in the simplest of things.
Thoughts
Some things take time when there is a poverty of time. Self-absorption makes the best use of what little there is.
Art is fiction, and enjoyed as such. There is no need to pretend it is any more than this. Live Life Artfully.
All things start small.
Louisiana
alluvial flood plain
I grew up with three siblings on the outskirts of Baton Rouge, not quite the country, but to my young mind our home stood at the edge of a wilderness. The other side of our backyard fence, beneath the moss-covered hardwood trees, my older brother and I would spend many afternoons and summer days exploring woods and creeks where we would find snakes, bugs, frogs, and turtles. There was a lake behind the house where the deep, resonant mating calls of the bullfrog broke the damp, still night air, while peacocks in the morning would make their own distant, shrill announcements from the lake’s far bank. On an occasional cool morning the peacocks would come into the yard, often to be chased back over the fence by our delighted morning selves.
During these years I recall sitting on the living room floor and drawing volumetric, foreshortened images in pen of my best friend riding towards me on his training-wheeled bike. My mother made special places on the wall to tack up these works of art, giving them special recognition. My drawing, and the paintings which came later, has always been about creating a small place where the mind can go to explore, and to find things living there which never cease providing new imaginative experiences. In this respect, my first impressions of this world I was born into are still with me.
Creating inspires devotion. Paint, plant, draw in a parsimonious way.
Fix the forlorn instruments gathering dust in the laboratory cupboards. Breaking what’s never been broken, the first thought of its kind.
Nursing a diabetic cat, giving him this many more years of life, until he died. I buried him beneath my window.
