Just the facts Ma’am

5 August 2024

Just the facts Ma’am

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 1 August 2024, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

I’ve just finished Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich which I had last read some fifty years ago in high school. Even if I appreciated it then, today, it has had a more profound effect upon me than it did when I was so young.  

Already, I have so many reflections about it this time around. I was seventeen when I first read it, and now I find myself older than was even the poor Ivan Ilyich whose last few months Tolstoy chronicled with the attention of an ER nurse. In those days people seemed to age quicker than we do now because evidently, the bourgeoisie ate, drank, and smoked way too much, so naturally, it wasn’t a great life style choice. Unlike the late 19th century, today’s wealthy elite is inversely slimmer than the bankers of that era. Like in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, it also paints a picture of too much food and drink and not enough yoga and aerobics to keep the burgermeister crowd from their early demise. Re-reading it today has naturally filled me with newer reflections about both life and art. How have I lived these past fifty years, one that was given to me so freely?Am I happy and grateful for life I ask myself?   

How one lives one’s life and the consequences of a having purpose or not, are great themes in Art. Like Ivan Ilyich, many of us spend our lives pursuing empty dreams, while others, who may have big dreams are too sleepy to pursue them. But there are still other lucky ones whose big dreams are as strong as their resolve. 

Many of us are fortunate to live in an era like our own because it is a great moment for both doers and dreamers. People, in most countries, both rich and poor, are going after their dreams and adventures around the world with more ease than ever before. The globe has never been more porous for such thirsty dreamers. I think it’s great time to be alive if one has the discipline to make them real in spite of economic disadvantage. 

“Youth is wasted on the young” goes the cliché, but I’ve changed my opinion on that one. Today, with more information at our fingertips than ever before, I’ve read about so many gifted young people around the globe; musicians, writers, environmentalists, etc, etc,,, who are all grabbing this life firmly with both hands and jumping off the starting line with vigour and determination. So just because many of the rest of us didn’t, doesn’t mean that many others didn’t. Maybe some were lucky enough to have had super-cool parents who loved them and inspired them to flourish very early on in life... Maybe some intrepid youngsters were just born for a surprising life, and even knew it from an early age. Either way, when an old geezer spouts that old cliché about youth being wasted on the young, run away from them as fast as your legs can carry you because it just means that they wasted their own youth. I know this because i wasted much of my own life. 

I came to Painting early but that doesn’t mean that I preservered at it from the get-go. I lived in a dream world that prevented me from taking anything too seriously, even my own talents. Of course, I couldn’t know this at the time because like they say, denial isn’t just a river in Egypt. It took me decades to settle down. But you know what? It wasn’t that I suddenly became enlightened and instantly got to work. I had to first get sober before I could allow any creative juice to bring me up to the surface again. But this was just my story, one of billions on this earth, one of little real meaning to anyone else but myself. Tolstoy’s great truth is that lots of us are still Ivan Ilyich for a whole variety of reasons no matter what our age.

Still, all this has a personal resonance for me because deep down inside me, making art in this impoverished world of suffering and cruelty has always seemed like a selfish indulgent activity. My real problem was that I projected this disdain I had for myself upon even my creativity. This was a shame because it was something I really did love, and for which I had a natural gift. Sadly, I secretly went through my early life feeling like this. It was carried inside me like an early ailment, like polio or the plague. That I was suddenly healed of this dark cloud still amazes me today because I see that I might never have changed had I not gotten sober. My life is like an airplane that takes off in a rainstorm but climbs into a clear blue sky. 

And like millions of other readers, I too, am a huge fan of everything Tolstoy ever wrote. Like a magician he transports me with ease from one event to the next within just a few paragraphs. And like an early screenwriter, he also moves me steadily from one moment to the next, sentence by sentence. His style is clear cut, almost impersonal, but then I guess all this might depend upon the translator. He framed his dialogue in dead-pan like a cop when a witness jabbered on too long, “...just the facts ma’am”... And this style I’ve always associated with Cezanne’s late pictures because if there was one painter who approached Tolstoy with that same cold, dispassionate truth, it was Paul Cezanne. 

Cezanne, like any competent painter, told us stories. No matter what the abstracted means or language he used to construct it, it’s still a visual story that conveyed something to the viewer. Is it a feeling or a just an idea? Or is it both? We judge it by its craft but also by its inherent vision, one that reaches our gut. A great story, if poorly told, either through words or through paint, will still be unsuccessful no matter what spin has been put upon it by galleries or curators. 

Cezanne’s late paintings around Aix tell us stories with the same regular efficiency of Tolstoy’s Swiss watch, only bigger, with more levers and buttons and brushstrokes. Yet all these tiny components move at a steady Swiss pace towards a synchronised surface plane composed of small colourful splotches of paint placed exactly where they ought to be. Suddenly, I’m reminded of summer evenings in Provence when insects are everywhere and keep the air circulating in a constant buzzy motion. 

Why all this comes up for me today? Perhaps it’s a reminder that all good work, either on a page or a canvas, indeed any creative act, is always about relationships. I guess it’s one of the most important lessons I learned from Cezanne and Tolstoy, but also my teacher Leo Marchutz.

Come to think of it, this picture from four nights ago, would never have been painted had I not spent a lot of time looking and thinking about Cezanne's luminosity. He taught me to look at light. But funny enough today, I rarely ever look at his work anymore. Sure, once in a while, there are a few pictures that can still hold me spellbound but none of his books are hanging around my coffee table anymore. And yet, I’m still aware that his legacy, among other things, is about light, and this fashioned me into the painter I've become for better or worse. And it’s true that I can still go on about him the same way many young people go on about Taylor Swift, but I think also that for me in this series at Brunswick Heads, he is still as foundational as Latin is to French, Italian, and Spanish.

So, lucky for me, it was a magnificent bloom the other night, but also callously cold. I was underdressed and froze out on the empty dune yet I was happy and cold all together. 

This evening sky gave me a gentle and soothing light that eased its way into the sea, expanding everywhere all at once. The entire surface sparkled with tiny fragments of light before discreetly vanishing. These are, after all, wondrous winter skies that can make a painter crazy with delight.   

Now, looking at it a few days later, I see a happiness in it that mirrors that of the sky. It may sound corny, but honestly, it seems like the earth is always looking for any reason to express joy, whether it's a young puppy or the twilight sky. It's like it wants us to to be happy here. Is it because it knows how hard it is for us all?

There is a funny joke about a guy who dies and finds himself in a room with God, who simply asks him:

"So, how was heaven?"

Sol LeWitt, leaping to conclusions

16 June 2021

Sol LeWitt, leaping to conclusions

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 21 June 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

Although I’ve enjoyed Sol LeWitt vicariously for many years I’ve never really been emotionally moved by his work. He’s a conceptual artist and his work doesn’t pretend to be touchy-feely. Although I was born in New York, I was only a sometimes resident over the years, and yet I was infected at birth with an ironic spirit. So thus it wasn’t difficult to appreciate his mind even if I didn’t always follow his cerebral peregrinations up and down, and along the curvy ceilings of his installations.

He once famously said, “the idea becomes the machine that makes the art.” In a way, I kind of agree, except only partially, even if I could be sure to understand his meaning, because it’s a declaration that might need to be parsed open by a neurosurgeon with a special skill in semantics. But yes, the idea in any creative work is pretty paramount. Ideas, like rivers, are after all, the source of everything, even our emotions. So, though I could quibble with the word ‘machine’, it’s still an interesting proposition, albeit on the dry end. 

But it leaves out the execution of ‘art’, what I would deem to be craft. And being a painter, I am primarily invested in how an idea is executed. How could I not be? I’m a Romantic not a Conceptual artist. What interests me is how an idea is expressed successfully in a creative work. This a huge discussion, bigger than I can address here, but I think as a painter, it lies in both realms of creative intelligence and craft within any artistic profession, and so I owe it to Sol Lewitt for provoking such a hot topic for any artist to think about. 

In this series of pictures at Brunswick Heads for example, the ‘idea’ isn’t complicated, it’s simply to follow the colour wheel into the Twilight. But working from a seacape as I do leads to a pretty open field and allows for a wide variety of ideas to pursue within this ‘idea’. I’ve chosen a painterly one that allows me to explore colour, but there are any number of ways, including conceptual ones that can open up new avenues to explore.

My pathway out at the beach at dusk is not a conceptual process but one that takes perseverance and a little discipline to show up to see if my craft is up to the task. Besides, it’s also a lot of fun, something I imagine LeWitt would equally appreciate. 

I also share with him a love for a vast array of ecletic kinds of Art, notably in his case, work oriented towards a sensuous design. A key into my understanding of his aesthetic came when I understood that he was crazy for the paintings by the Aboriginal painter Emily Kame Kngwarreye (among others), whom I had never heard of before arriving onto these shores. For myself, it was a giant revelation to discover her work, so when I learned this about him it further opened my interest in him. This even revealed to me that though he was maybe not a Romantic, at least he appeared to be a sensualist at heart, and indeed, an artistic hedonist hiding behind the alter of Minimalism.

My knowledge of Minimalist Art was minimal too, limited almost exclusively to the artist Richard Tuttle whom I discovered after seeing a show at the Whitney a long while back. At that time, I didn’t get him at all. His work appeared too cute and whimsical, and truthfully, when I first came upon his work I was far too serious to see it, or find the whimsy elegance in it. I was basically stuck up and my head up my own behind. I had too many ideas already in my overworked mind to allow me to play freely in his work. Looking back at that period of my life I’d say that my serious nature was intellectually agoraphobic. 

But like all new and original art, Tuttle’s sensibilities asked me questions which much later on I became ready to open up to. Years later when I went to Japan I thought a lot about about him because I saw him everywhere.

So when Sol Lewitt says that “the idea becomes the machine that makes the art” I’m reminded of how much I think about Painting from all periods in art history. For me, it’s seamless slide show that runs in loops around me, such that history is always ever-present when it comes to the craft of Painting. 

When I speak with young artists today I’m astonished at how little interest they seem to have in our culturally diverse collective past. I don’t want to be critical of them per se, because I think it seems to reflect more upon art education in this period of our contemporary time. And like all periods, or chapters of art history, art education has always been slanted towards any number of institutions that share control over the intellectual zeitgeist of each century, some freely, but most, like the Church, and politically repressive states, through propaganda. Let's face it, art has never been free, although today is about as good as it gets. And yet it is still under the yoke of powerful establishments like museums, art schools and the gallery systems. So, it all comes down to money, the newest religion. Big surprise.        

But my small chagrin comes from the fact that today, though there is no apparent shortage of fantastic ideas, students are taught these ideas as being almost entirely separated from the craft, so as a painter, I lament this. 

Me, I see the craft of Painting to be a great and honourable one with a long history, one assembled from many different traditions. Today inspire of that, it appears to have little or no memory of how to integrate ideas into its tactile and sensual intelligence of form. Is this by design, or just forgetfulness? It’s like there was a divorce, and because of that, the children got a bit lost. But regardless, it's the way it is now, so we live with it. One thing I know is that Painting always survives in many forms during these chapters over the longer arc of time. 

But back to Sol Lewitt, another thing I really like about him is that he took photos of everything it seems. I like this obessesive curiosity in his oeuvre. His documentation of things around his home and studio via the camera I think reveals his soul. It’s where he shows us his spontaneous nature unlike so many of his Installation works which feel cerebral, though playfully so. If I am not mistaken there are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of photos he took of his bookshelves and various objects around his apartment. He had a great eye, and despite what one might take away from his conceptual premise that it's the 'ideas' that become the ‘machines for making art', he was still, after all, a visual artist and self-proclaimed mystic. And in this light, I would interject that it's “curiosity is the machine for making art” because it was his unrehearsed, spontaneous eye that took so many photos.

Another quality I appreciate about him, an element, though not essential for an artist, was his humour. He wasn’t a serious, solemn or sullen, Conceptual Artist like so many others who came to art through the sciences and engineering. I think he was a merry-maker in his art form in the style of the writer Ken Kesey. 

And to be honest, I don’t know what I’m trying to say about any of this in regards to my picture from the other night. These Evening Prayers, so far away, not only from Sol Lewitt, but from the soul of New York too. They are also messy examples of creativity at the extreme opposite end of so much ‘contextual ideology’ in our Contemporary world of Art today. But hey!

In this series, when I am out at the beach, I generally go into a state of no-mind, no-thought, no ideas even, and I do this by habit, not really even by choice. This almost hypnotic effect of working from the same motif out in Nature, over a long period always at the dusk hour, has put me into a cycle of automomous productivity almost as if it’s my ritual that is the machinery making the art. 

The other night the air was chilly due to a breezy south wind, and the sky was as clear as it can ever get around here. No moon, and a magnificent ‘bloom’ blossomed open. Nice! 

This was the last of three studies. It was a festival of colour. So unlike the oeuvre of Sol LeWitt, and though not a Conceptual artist, this small souvenir from the other night reveals that I’m more mystic than rationalist. I’m also asking viewers to follow me off a cliff to experience Nature as I have, but this will only happen if the pictures are successful enough to seduce the viewer.  

(Re-print) Richard Serra and Pierre Soulages, dark cousins for dark times

 

L'enfance, oil on canvas, 1997 150 X 150 cm

This is a painting I made back in 1997 when I was in my small studio at the Châteaunoir, eons ago before I left Aix for the Drôme. I am not sure what I could say about it except that I was certainly trying to address dark issues from my own early life which we now refer to as Family of Origin problems, Hmmmm. 

These days, the contemporary method for expressing angst and existential discontent appears to make a beeline straight to the pigment generically known as Black. Most painters (because most of the original ones are quite neurotic) will at some point in their lives make a tour through the dark landscape inside themselves. The less original, but no less crazy, just paint the surface black or bitumen à la Pierre Soulages, or even Richard Serra. For painters, it does seem to be the contemporary go-to solution, though sadly it offers little inspiration in the long run because these paintings will live on, seemingly paralysed in a state of mourning, crucified, as it were on empty walls in lonely wings of great museums all over the world. And as dramatic and satisfying as it may seem in the very moment of 'self-expressive execution', it's still a cliché and it is unsuccessful in the long run. It is a cheap fix as my auto mechanic would say.

And one could say I am being pretentious, presumptuous to rip and riff through such heavy weights in the Art world, but hey! These things have to be articulated even if few want to hear it. Being critical in this art world today is a lot like being a dentist where one can use sharp, precise tools to cause pain. Ha Ha. But I speak as a painter who loves colour after all, and Painting is about the totality of colour in the natural world.

Pierre Soulages, 163 X 181 cm 2004

Richard Serra, 1978 from installation at SFMOMA

These things I have posted by them are deliberate adventures into their dark headspace and I really don't even know how I would begin discussing them if I were to have the unfortunate task of having to write reviews of each.

I have seen both of these artist's works up close over the years in various museums around the world, yet I can never shake the feeling that this is all shallow work, and moreover, even they, capable and well educated as they both are, should know better, are better than this work. They should know better than play us all for fools (at least Soulages should, because he comes from a great Painting tradition in France).

Because of this shallow trick of indulging in so much ubiquitous black, I am never allowed access to an enduring emotion from their work. (OK Black is bleak, I get it,,,,) City sophisticates in Paris and New York express more existential disdain by simply wearing black, morning, noon and night.   

So for the artist the question comes down to just how does one express this terrible darkness and angst which most stoic souls spend all their lives trying to hide? What is the creative solution without the systematic cliché?

Going to the pigment black, to keep it simple, is basically just a cliché, a hollow one, incapable of expressing the horror at so much cruelty and suffering in the world. (I am trying not be redundant) but personally, I cannot feel this work by either of these two artists for this very reason. Their abstractions, though so heavy, they still don't possess enough weight, and they certainly don't expand any more understanding of their own personal plights. Nothing opens up or goes out from their work, it's a closed circuit at the edge of a black hole sucking in everything around them.

Yet despite these condemnations, I will say that I have also seen Soulages in a bright light, and also with great success. I went to the tiny town of Conques, where years ago, I found his stained glass designs for the magnificent church there to be both imaginative and appropriate to the space. This small church in Conques is such an extraordinary example of Romanesque Art that failing this task would be a cruel fate for any contemporary artist. His response to this unique church was secular and sober. It's  austerity compliments both our own age but that of 12th century France too. And what if his large paintings opened up his own airy inner light by exposing it to the world?

Soulages exhibits the black existential fact that Life (for so many French intellectuals) is something heavy, something which weighs down our soul as we go about our daily lives.

There is no joie-de vivre here. And yet curiously, the French, in so many ways, do live a light-hearted life full of mirth and epicurean joy. This is also the contradiction I have with Soulage's work. Creatively speaking, he employs a one dimensional and predictable solution to this cultural paradox which is way too complex for his efforts. And b.t.w, where is the necessary irony in this work that seems so obviously lacking to the rest of us modern and secular souls? 

Richard Serra's work, on the other hand, often exhibits a muscular American force, the cultural equivalent to the doctrine of American Manifest Destiny which has pro-pulsed American might forcibly outward and onto to the world at large whether it was even desired or not (though to be fair in the 19th century, it probably was).

But just like Soulage, with these large black drawings Serra's work seems to declare his disgust with the American dream, and yet, his own oversized steel sculptures appear to be the artistic extension of that same expansive American doctrine, one which his black drawings at the same time, privately disdain. So it's conflictual; it's a paradox, an American one, not a nuanced French one. His dark pessimism in these drawings is also an unveiled desire to push that blackness outward to an unsuspecting world. Why such bleak narcism?

But getting back to my almost insignificant painting, I had wanted to relate an anecdotal idea in a visual way, a pictorial, poetic and sensual way, perhaps inviting someone else into it as a question, not make a declaration. 

A few years back, a friend made a comment about my work after a recent trip to Paris where museums are infinitely more important than stadiums. She had spent a few days wandering museums and galleries looking at everything. Upon her return she said to me, 

"What I like about your paintings is that they feel like surprises, questions in fact, not responses..... they are like you in fact, always full of questions!" She went on,

"Everything I see these days feels to me so oversized, so heavy, and so full of answers. There are way too many affirmations, commenting on such and such, opinions and declarations about life!,,,, everyone wants to hit you over the head with ideas and statements!"

"It drives me crazy!.... (ça me rend folle!!)"

I have always appreciated this observation because deeply inside, I have always felt the same way. I like that quality in other art I see and feel and intuitively I was trying to express that same idea in these "non-objective" paintings I was doing at the time. 

So I guess my biggest criticism with Soulages and Serra is that their work acts too often like walls which keep us all out. In French they say about someone with a big personality, and often slightly pejorative (and its usually about men) "Il a une grande gueule" (he's a bigmouth) And their work, like so much these days, certainly possesses 'une gueule'. Maybe that it is the nature of the Art world today, where to get ahead, to get anywhere, to be seen, to be heard, one needs 'une grand geuele'... Think Trump, just sayin.

 

And even if they would never admit it, (this is after all about self-expression) they may as well have a sign outside the exhibit entrance that says "Keep Out", and this is a problem for me because the whole nature of Art concerns the opposite; it is an invitation to the world to enter into the work of the artist.

In a bin or in a museum?

18 September 2020

In a bin or in a museum?

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 15 September 2021, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

The skies have been salty and full of humidity over the past few days, and this is usually great for painting. This is one of two studies from the other night. I am always amazed at how different each of these studies can be. Each evening light, just like me, can be so different. Lately, as we approach the end of winter, these skies have been delicious. In this one I managed to paint until just the exact moment when I knew I had to stop. It felt like I was taking an exam back in school and just as the teacher said “Time everyone”, I was putting my pen down on the desk. (of course in school this never happened, but hey!) I caught the bloom just at its climax. It isn’t often I have such perfect timing. And indeed, looking at it now, I see a ripe tomato. 

This reminds me of a tidbit about the British writer Anthony Trollope who my teacher Leo adored but whom I've read yet to read. Mr Trollope worked at several Post Office’s throughout his life and had a reputation for punctuality. He wrote 47 books during his life apparently by writing in 15-minute intervals for three hours per day when he wasn’t working at the Post office. Over the years I've read two different versions of his strict writing discipline. One, is that he wrote early morning, afternoons, and evenings, and he managed 250 words during each session. When he got his 250 words he'd stop and put down his pen whether or not he was in the middle of either a word or sentence. The second version I've heard is that he put his watch on the edge of his desk and he worked until precisely 8:00 AM, when he put his pen down either in the middle of a word or sentence, then left for the Post Office. Naturally, someone like me thinks of him when I realise how just how undisciplined I’ve been in my life. 

But today, here in the 21 century, I found myself thinking about the relevance of these small studies. It wasn’t at all in any unpleasant way, I was just contemplating their worth in the grander scheme of things. I guess it means that I hope that they do communicate something to someone else at the very minimum. Do they have an inherent worth? Are they able to convey an emotion to another human being? Would they surprise anyone? I don’t know the answer to these questions, but I do sometimes practice this secret way of judging them. It’s a game actually. I imagine that one of these small studies is on a wall in a Museum tucked away and off from the main gallery, then I wonder if I would notice it when walking by it. Would I make a bee-line for it? Would it take its place among the better pictures that surround it? Of course it’s amusing to admit this, but I’m not embarrased, It’s just something I do. I cannot speak for other painters, writers or composers, but I do know that everyone secretely wishes to see their own work somewhere other than on a wall in their own bedroom. Why not a museum, I sometimes think?

My little game that I play with these paintings is linked to the way I also visit museums. When I’m in a museum and move through rooms, I first like to stand in the middle of the gallery and do a 360 degree turn while scanning for something to catch me my eye. Usually, if I am not pressed for time, and crowds permitting, I like to walk briskly through to the end of the entire show only to then return to the start so that I’ll know not to miss something extraordinary at the end and I’ll have time enugh to spend with it.

I kind of like this small game because it means that I can imagine something good coming out of all this work. It could get pretty lonely if one wasn’t able to see beyond their own canvas board after all. I imagine too, if when a woman contemplates her face and hair, her neck and shoulders, does she allow herself to wonder if others find her beautiful, or even interesting? 

I remember once, a long time ago when on a hangliding weekend in the alps with some friends, I was writing in my diary at a cafe one morning. A friend and fellow pilot came by and joined me. He was used to seeing me with my diary on these trips each morning at a cafe. He asked me if I imagined about the audience which might read these pages. I said that I didn’t worry about that, I simply liked writing about things seen and heard each day; about flying in the clouds, about art, about people, everything in fact. I basically said that I wasn’t writing to be read by anyone else, I had gotten into the habit of keeping a diary for the fun of it. My friend was a well educated Frenchmen, logical and rational,  to a fault, a math teacher in fact  and he wouldn’t have any of this. He said “Chris, one writes to be read”. His remark stopped me in my tracks and I confess that I found it difficult to rebut his remark for I could understand the flaw in my reasoning. But it was too hard to explain to him that I hadn’t really thought it through enough about whether or not there was an end game to any of it. I was just keeping a diary for the enjoyable pleasure of writing. By then anyway, I was hooked already on writing about the weather, my days, my dreams, my faults, and all that thinking that we humans do all the time. Years later, I understood that if these pages weren’t read in a diary form, then somehow, there would be another purpose for it. Its reason hadn’t yet become clear to me any more than this.

In truth, There was a reason I had wanted to begin a diary but I didn’t want to reveal all that to him out of discretion. I began the diary in 1986, because like so many other people, I had wanted to create a dialogue with myself, to place myself into the days of own life. I had tried a few times earlier but like many people, I couldn’t get it off the ground. But on a boat to Greece one wintry afternoon, with a big hangover, I finally got serious. 

But there was another reason. It was because I had never known my father intimately. I knew almost nothing about his past. Due to circumstances out of our control, we became separated, so from the age of eight, I saw him only for brief moments thereafter and consequently I knew almost nothing about what made him tick. I know now that it’s through families that children find out about their parents but we didn’t have one that included grand-parents or cousins. Our past on both sides of the family were like lone continents, uninhabited and unexplored. But WW2 had severed much my mother’s family, and they never really recovered. 

But I certainly loved my father and he, me, but our life was made up of one evening here, or another one there, every couple of months, then it became years. Only the letters between us acted as small bridges, then he died during me second year in France. So, in the back of my mind I also harboured a deep secret with this diary, and it was to write about my life so that if, and when I had a child of my own, they would know something about me. 

Now, almost forty years later, and without children, my diaries are huddled together like in an orphanage at breakfast hour, all lined up on long shelf and surrounded by books in my home. I actually appreciate this irony. But what I couldn’t know when I began writing the diary was that I was learning to express myself in those thousands of pages and thousands of days. I also realised later that because I wrote, I also recorded infinitely indescribable details that became stored within me as tangible memories. Meanwhile, I also was learning to write and find pleasure in it for its own sake. 

So yes, even to paint, is inherently a desire to communicate one’s ideas however inchoate or obscure they may be, because it too, is it’s just like revealing to oneself, or to others, an emotion. But first and foremost, these crafts are both primarily created for the simple pleasure and challenge of doing these things. After all, like any kind of job one takes, one never knows where it will take them, or what they wil take away from it by the end of the experience. Like the thousands of pages and the thousands of pictures, will they end up in a bin or in a museum? Who knows? The whole point of creating books and pictures is to reveal truths to the author and painter, who, b.t.w, are sometimes, the very last to know them.