Time and Light Switches

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ thankful for the falling leaves thankful for the changing times  thankful for the shaking world because the sun is still shining  and the moon is still pulling the tides and the world is still spinning grateful for the forward marching grateful for the supporting hands grateful for the smiling flowers because the waves are still crashing and the clouds are still drifting and the moss is still growing thanks to the hope of the world thanks to the love of the peoples thanks to the joy of the land because there is still breath in my lungs and breath in the lungs of the ones i love and breath left to be breathed 

One of my biggest things as an artist is self discipline. Beyond my normal support system of friends and family I don’t really have anyone telling me to get up and paint. There is no external force pushing me towards my art, if anything it pulls me away. What I’m saying is, to be an artist one must foster incredible amount of self discipline. I’m not in school, haven’t been for years, and the only schedule I have is one I enforce myself. Learning to be the master of my own life and will is part of growing up, but it isn’t something that is easily taught, or learned.   Now to give credit where credit is due, I have amazing friends and family who are not shy to say they believe in me and celebrate me well. But there isn’t anyone who sits with me every day telling to me get up and get going, that job, the one of motivating and discipline is on me. And that’s part of how its supposed to be. My life is mine to live and I have to be responsible to make things happen.  I could ta...

Sometimes I know what I’m talking about, and sometimes I have to write the thought out of my way. I’ll have this sentence or thought that is in the way of what I’m trying to write about. Today the extra thinking slipped though my fingers like sand on a windy day, it was there and it was brief and then I could feel it leave me behind.   I had read this piece of writers advise, it was talking about how when you come back from a break you have to work though the rust. There will be these not as good sentences or paragraphs, like in a bottle of raw milk you have to scrape off the cream at the top to get to the milk. Which is to say that those first few tries will have something to them but you have to work with them. Practice begets fluidity.  I find no fault with this advise, only that when I read it it sounded like a threat. It wasn’t of course, I just wanted the hope not the realism.  I think its 50/50, half the time I know when I sit down what I’m gonna write about ...

I used to never finish the paintings I started. I have probably 20 canvases in my studio that have one layer of paint or another but that are not completed works. A lot of them I can even remember what I was going for, even though I began many of them years ago. I always found it irritating that I didn’t finish my paintings but it took me some time to understand that it was more than just irritating, it was hurting my process. Look at it this way, you begin baking a cake, measuring ingredients and mixing them together. But then you discover, you’re not quite sure how to preheat your oven, so you stop there. All you are left with is soggy batter and no finished product. If you never bake that cake, never finish that project, you won’t ever fully learn the lesson. A burnt cake would have taught you not to put the heat that high, a soggy one would have taught you to turn up the heat, a cake that stuck to the pan would teach you to grease that pan. But you never turned on the oven, so a...