The last time I posted in this space was March 6, 2021 — an uncanny coincidence, this being five years later to the day. But the idea of a return to writing has been brewing for a while, and the journey has been rife with uncanny coincidences.

“Art is not purity: it is purification. Art is not liberty: it is liberation.” — Clarice Lispector, Loud Object

In an essay entitled “A Household” about Francisco de Zurbarán, John Berger discusses the painting “Veronica’s Veil”, and why when he first saw it in Stockholm, it “stopped him in his tracks.”

In Roman mythology, the genius loci was the guardian spirit of a place.

“You have to have something that you don’t ask anybody else about. I’ve always been aware of that with painting. No one else can really help you, or say whether it’s good or bad. It’s just you and it, and that’s great…”

"I feel that no one can lead another to truth, because truth is infinite; it is a pathless land, and no one can tell you how to find it... "

"James McNeill Whistler used to walk down to the Atlantic shore carrying a few thin planks and his paints…”

"…Even stillness, where there was stillness, consisted of hundreds and hundreds of moments of motion that kept their equilibrium..."

"It's strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you alone. Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits." - from Anam Cara, by John O'Donohue.

I wish I could remember for what I was searching when I stumbled across David Owen's blog post, "Wolf Kahn: Artistic Freedom". The essay is based on the book Wolf Kahn: Pastels, written by Wolf Kahn.  

"Sometimes, on mild summer nights, he would spread a blanket somewhere on a freshly mown meadow, lie on his back and look up at the starry sky..."

 ... from A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler

I've been listening to John Berger, "Ways of Seeing," and thoughts have wandered off on a tangent but not completely unrelated to his point.

Robert Henri, from The Art Spirit...

"Advice about your paintings is difficult. As I said to you before, I cannot interest myself in whether they will pass juries or not…”

From an Alan Watts lecture, titled "Taoism"

"The tao is a certain kind of order, and this kind of order is not quite what we call order when we arrange everything geometrically in boxes, or in rows..."

Someone once asked me, "Why do you paint?"
And they honestly wanted to know.
And despite having asked myself the same question for years, I could not put words to an answer.