More and more, I find myself just letting paint be paint on a surface and not asking it to look like anyTHING. Even a version of a thing I’ve never actually seen in quite the way I painted it, like fish swimming amongst the high branches of tall trees.

I remember drawing the air conditioner in the art room in my high school in Africa. I thought the more I could make it look like that air conditioner, the better the drawing would be.

I think those were important exercises. They helped me learn to see what I was looking at. They helped me document something of the world, if not interpret it.

Now I don’t care much about air conditioners. I could indicate one with a few simple lines if it were important to what I was saying.

So I painted trees for a while, and then I put fish in them. Now I paint brushstrokes, and sometimes fish appear. I don’t always fight the urge to make one look more like a fish.

If I let the paint just be paint, with no preconceived ideas about what else it might represent, I’m sure the pictures will still reveal themselves when I lay still on my bed and stare at it on my wall.

Things I never intended, yet I painted them. Things I see that you may not, just as you may see things that I miss.

Photography is good at documenting what the camera sees, so the paint can relax and look like paint.

Beautiful glaze on a ceramic pot melts and goes through chemical changes in the intense heat of the kiln. It does what glaze does, and we see the beauty with its drips and crazing. In the same way, we can appreciate paint when it does what paint does, not asking it to always look like something it is not.