Garden Spline

It turns out that I cannot exactly choose what I want to do.  I've been trying to move off the image I've been painting and I thought I could deliberately get to a new thing -you know like start in, it gets rough for awhile then you settle in.  

...but that didn't happen at least not yet...it appears that there is something in this image that I have not yet discovered and it keeps calling me...and try as I might I keep going back to it.

Even the colors remain the same.  It used to bother me how artists seem to find a way to paint...and then they won't move off it.  Now I am one of those.  Like being stuck in Motherwell's open series or making Kandinsky's paintings over and over.  

Oh well.  So be it hey?  I'm painting the images I see when I look at a tree.  It is a botanical garden in paint.  It is the dirt below The soil down there and the mulch.

It is the bizarre images left by the ice and snow and the frozen trash that blows in the yard the strange reflective glare of water on the leaves and of my image reflected in the window pane.

We used to have deer all over the yard and I built a hosta garden out back.  It worked...!  They ate those hostas to the ground but stayed away from my hydrangeas up close to the house.

Maybe I am like the deer and stick with the hostas.  I paint an image that is close to me.

And I come back to it again and again...maybe if I do it again I will finally capture it.  Or maybe it is like trying to capture Paris in photographs.  They almost always need to be up close.  And it takes thousands.  

Im reading Cervantes right now and his myopic vision, well not his but Don Quixote's, is right for me.  He continually interprets the world with his own vision of what it is.  His adventures are always close to home.  He is noble to a fault, and his fault is his own imposition on the world.  Or more accurately, his vision.

Once a long time ago now my mother went to visit her mother in Georgia.  She was sleeping in the small room at the end of the hallway set off from the rest of the house.  One night as she was just going to sleep she opened her eyes and there in front of her was a man.  Being as brave as she was, she jumped up.  The man ran out the door and down the hallway and slipped inside her mother's room.

My mom raced there and pounded on the locked door.  A minute later her mother opened it.  My mother looked around in surprise.  No one was there.  She told her mother what had just happened and her mom laughed and said -Oh Pat that is just the old Indian.

After my mom told me that story I thought I never want to inherit those abilities.  Never.