I just want to paint.  I’ve thought about it and really can’t tell you exactly why…ever since I was a kid, picking up a pencil and trying to draw.  When I’d go to museums or look at art books and see what old painters did, I was fascinated.  I still marvel when I see a Rembrandt self portrait and I’m actually looking into the eyes of the long dead Painter, or look at a masterful landscape and try to understand what the Painter saw.  I just always wanted to paint. 

I think I have a love/hate relationship with painting – it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.  I love the look of oil paint, the smell of oil paint, the texture of oil paint.  I love standing on the cliff overlooking the ocean, waiting with anticipation at what is going to happen on the canvas.  I enjoy sharing painting trips with good friends, and after the short and furious struggle every painting is, commiserating on what might have been.  On occasion there is a celebration.  I have gained a new appreciation for the landscape and God’s creation in trying to render it with the limited tools of a thick viscous semi-liquid coupled with good old-fashioned hard work mixed with brains (I believe Edgar Payne first coined that phrase.)

I’m trying to do what every other painter is too.  Make a good painting.  One that holds up, that hopefully stands the test of time.  A painting that, when viewed, is recognized for the hard work that went into it, long before that brush hit the canvas.  A work of art that as one painter said “Lifts the spirit beyond the mere making of a picture.”

I am always humbled when someone trades the fruits of their hard labors, for the outcome of mine.