When we type words, we can give emphasis by using italics, or a larger typeface, an exclamation point, or maybe using a different font or color.

When we want to give importance to an image, we can place it in a mat or frame. This border around the image sets it apart from the rest of the world and draws attention to the piece. A larger frame gives it more status, and says pay attention.

This is important.

No brushstroke, regardless of the color or shape, will ever be a pumpkin or a tree. It will always be a smear of paint on some surface. As an artist, you need to decide what makes that application of paint represent what you want to convey.

It is not always necessary to fool the eye (trompe l’oeil) into believing that this paint is an actual balcony or telephone. For some people, the test of a good painting is whether it can pass as a photograph. I heartily reject that criteria. I have a camera that can make something look exactly like a photograph in a fraction of a second. To make something look like a painting, painted by a human being, is something that artificial intelligence is now trying to emulate.

You and I (assuming you, my dear reader, are human), have the ability to produce human art simply by dipping our brush into the paint and applying it to our surface of choice. It really requires no talent, human. It only takes action. It takes doing. You can make a mark. A handprint. A line.

And you will have left a record of your presence.

Some paint smearers are applauded for the precision of the shapes, colors and values in the paint they leave behind. You can learn from what they did, as you can learn from anything. What matters is what soaks so deep into you that it comes out again in the way you smear paint or make mud pies or draw on your cave walls with sticks from the fire.

Because someone else did something beautiful doesn’t mean your voice is less. There is so much more to be said. So much more to be thought about, and so much more to be expressed.

Trust your voice to know what to say, and trust your hand to know how to say it. I believe we were formed to do this. To look up at the night sky, or out across the water and see something far bigger than us. Pondering how small we are, we come to realize, no.

We are part of this.

Construction on my house was underway while I was under construction in the womb, and we were both unveiled in 1960.

I’ve lived longer in this house than I have lived anywhere else, and I have lived in this house longer than anyone else ever has.

My house and I are the same age, and we’ve been together for half of our lives.

I’ve lived other places for shorter times. Places that have had a huge impact on me. They were my homes because they were my parents’ homes.

This one is my children’s home because it is my home.

I’ve been doing this here and there throughout the house. One friend said my house was like a rabbit warren. When another friend said these textures reminded her of hieroglyphics, I could see how its corridors and chambers were a little bit like an ancient Egyptian tomb. But in a good way.

Payton and I had another enjoyable mentoring session tonight. It’s amazing to me how art and storytelling can enable two people from different generations connect and enjoy one another’s company. We both have a passion for communicating through the genre of comics.

We’ve been meeting officially through
In Progress for one month now, and we have decided to continue our friendship beyond the duration of the paid schedule.

It took me many decades beyond age 14 to understand a fraction of what Payton already articulates, and so I want to be there to see what he does and hear what he thinks about when his prefrontal cortex actually develops. I want to share with him the things it took me so long to start to crack open on my own.

I don’t think we meet people by accident.

I believe that certain ones merge into our lives when the time is right.

This is why it doesn’t matter if your art, or your story doesn’t connect with everyone, or if someone doesn’t get it, or even criticizes you. Those people might make you question your art, and that might help you make it better. One day, maybe when you least expect it, someone will get it. Someone will connect, and you can make a difference.

Mixed media on paper.

My (Finnish) great grandfather had a garden where he grew pumpkins. When he harvested his pumpkins, he lined them up or arranged them into a pile and photographed them. I did not know this until November of 2020 when I finally opened the stack of photo albums I had inherited, which were once his. At that very time, the pumpkins and gourds I had grown that season were arranged on my table and on our porch. It was only a couple of days after Halloween.

For nearly thirty years, I’ve been making up stories about Mr. Pumpkinhead. For several years, I have been publishing them to their own blog. Click here to visit misterpumpkinhead.blogspot.com

I had a bit of an epiphany this morning when a friend explained that he understood why I paint trees the way I do. He said he was looking out his window at the trees in the moonlight and he saw the structure of the trees against the night sky. I am honored even to be one of the thoughts a friend has when they lay in their bed in the stillness of the night.

Growing up, I had those How To Draw books. They taught us to think of a pine tree as a simple cone shape first. Or a cat as a group of circles. I don’t do that at all.

When I paint a pine tree, I sort of paint it the way it grows. I paint the trunk, and then I paint in the larger branches and then the smaller branches and needles. I don’t start with the outline of the tree.

I had never thought of this before. Because this had never crossed my mind, I had never thought that someone else might do it differently. Or that someone who doesn’t paint might not even have a method of painting a tree.

He also talked about the purpose of a frame around a painting. Again, as a painter, I know that this is the border of my composition. If I am painting from the natural world, the frame, or the edge of the canvas delineates my painting. It selects, from the entire world, what I choose to show. In nature, the story just goes on and on as far as the eyes can see, and much, much further. So while some artists may be very good at representing a view, a detail, a tiny snippet of nature with paint, it’s really not like the real thing at all. It’s an illusion… an impression… a memory.

It is partly this understanding that frees me up from the need to make my paintings look exactly like the real thing (they never will) or the need to make my paintings look like a photograph (I have a camera for that).

I want my paintings to look like paint.

This might not seem like a big deal, but it hit me emotionally because it was so validating. I realize that with all of my writing I am actually fighting really hard for everything in life.

My friend’s comments were so meaningful to me because they had substance. They spoke to my process, and they gave me a new insight or perspective on my own work. There are things that are so basic that I don’t see them. Something obvious to someone else can be absolutely invisible to me.

For all of my assertions of I paint for myself, I still value and crave conversation with friends and other viewers about the work.

There are 14 paintings in the series, mostly 5×7, a couple are 8×10. They are acrylic and mixed media on watercolor paper.