no map

Paint is paint.  Oil, watercolor, ink, all the same when applied, push with pressure against sober reality.  Appropriateness, characterized by buildings and order, surrounds us like a skin.  And like any skin it is altered by ongoing turbulence from within and without. 

The environment becomes an arena.  Though I capture yay-big aspects of it with my camera, the process of painting is larger (for many of us, not just me) and functions like a dark room.  Painting is a "developing", but in a sense I find truer to the word.

My children draw everyday.  The subjects, lions and unicorns and maybe a few other four-legged creatures, are crafted over and over and over.  I adore these efforts.  I occasionally suggest they draw more lightly and loosely, but they press hard convinced their erasers will help.  The process wears and in the end cannot be hidden.  This struggle stains the paper and takes on a beauty all its own.

This repetition is familiar.  For me it is both the subject and the process, the endless city built only to be explored with the joy of no map.