I've always said, “If I had to do it over again, I’d be a farmer.” These days, I’m beginning to think I’d rather be an artist. Painting is something I have been doing almost my whole life; just not in art. I remember painting my bedroom when I was around 14, with gray walls and red trim, and sensing my father’s bemusement when I took him upstairs to see it. I thought it was cool, but all he could say was, “You did this in one day?” as if to say it didn’t take me long to ruin an otherwise perfectly good room. Later in life, I painted the entire exterior of a couple of houses while going to grad school to become a psychologist, and several years later, sidelined with problems of my own, I ended up working as a painter in the small town of Kent, CT. It was easy in those days to establish a painting business. There were few regulations, and basically, all you needed was a trade name, a good ladder, and a commercial truck. I was successful enough to work for a few prominent people and household names over the next 32 years, but when work was slow in the beginning, I painted a couple of dog portraits for my sisters as Christmas gifts. Feeling the rush of seeing them come to life on canvas, I was hooked on doing more. I knew I couldn’t make a living as an artist without any background or training, so it became nothing more than a hobby, but since then, I’d say I have probably completed close to 50 paintings in oil, acrylic, and watercolors. Now that I am a grandfather, and retired, I find myself reading a lot of children’s books again, just as I had for my son and daughter, but with a fresh eye toward the artwork. I am amazed at how creative the illustrators can be in telling a story with pictures, but something else strikes me as being indicative of a talented artist. Whereas my paintings are fairly straightforward, and I strive for something lifelike in my portraits, a good illustrator can capture the feelings of the book’s characters and the emotions of the moment with a simple gesture, a look, or the sweep of a brushstroke, bringing to life something that most artists would envy, and most of it is done in the name of entertaining kids. It makes me think I wouldn’t like farming after all. I would have enjoyed the life of an illustrator.

Watercolor is a difficult medium for me. It's hard to make the change from oils, because an effective watercolor depends on allowing light to pass through the paint, coming up from the paper and infusing it with a delicate sense of color, while oil is more opaque, and heavy. I rambled around with that idea for several months before I realized that the real problem was not watercolors, but my inability to be patient enough to work with them. It’s been said that they have a mind of their own, and allowing them enough time to dry in order to show their true colors before adding another layer of paint is important. I was more accustomed to controlling paint in the way that oils and acrylics are applied to canvas. I could keep going with oils before the first layer dried, and move around the painting, from one part to another, constantly cleaning my brushes, changing colors, and smoothing things out as I went along. It took several tutorials to realize that I was moving too quickly with watercolors, and making the classic mistake of trying to cover up the light with paint. You can paint light with oils, but it can’t be light in the same way that it is with watercolors. It almost seems like a good analogy to life.

The tension between thinking that a painting is going well, and being afraid that it isn't, is probably behind everything I've ever done, and evident to anyone who looks at any of my paintings or drawings. A couple of months ago, I was invited to hang some of them at a local library. They are still there, but this morning was the first time I've had a chance to look at them again in over 6 weeks. I was shocked. Since hanging the 30 or so works, I have been busy with other things, and not doing anything of significance in the way of art. I could say it’s been too hot, or I’ve been babysitting a lot, or just didn’t feel up to it, but drawing and painting have been on hold during the same amount of time my favorite works have been hanging in the library. I guess I should lament the fact that I haven’t done anything during that time, and from the way it appears, willing to sit back on my laurels, but the truth is I’ve been feeling as though I’ve lost some of the motivation to paint; until now, that is. Seeing what I did in the past, after a 2 month hiatus, was like looking at someone else’s work. The shock was that some of it looked good! That is not usually the way I think about what I’ve done. I rarely feel confident enough to tell myself a painting is good, or a drawing is worth framing, but even if I never think that way in the process of creating something in the future, at least I know now that I might feel differently if I just set it aside and forget about it for a while.

Before my father retired from The Port Authority, he went to night school, earned a teaching degree in Industrial Arts, and became a shop teacher at a local junior high. He also set up a shop in the basement for his own projects, and after he passed away, I discovered a folder of plans he had drawn up for each one. Some were simple diagrams, indicating the measurements and basic designs, but others were three-dimensional drawings that showed an obvious talent for drawing. With only a few exceptions, we never saw the finished projects.

After I took up painting, I found that I enjoyed drawing, too. It's a necessary step to begin a painting, but there are times when I don’t want to go over a drawing with paint because of all the work I put into it. Maybe that explains why my father left behind very few completed projects; why build something out of wood when you can satisfy your imagination on paper? Whatever was on his mind, finding that he had a talent for drawing was a connection to him I never knew I had, and could be the answer to the question I sometimes ask myself when I look back at some of my own work, “Where did that come from?”

Someone once said that schizophrenia is more of a perceptual disorder than a mental illness; schizophrenics see and hear things that are not there. In our own way, I think all of us are limited by our perceptions, not to the extent that a schizophrenic might be, but simply by the fact that we all see things differently. When I paint, I like to give free reign to that difference, and avoid conforming to any particular style or expectation of what a painting is supposed to look like.

At some point, when I am well into a painting, my perception of what looks good on the paper or canvas begins to take over, and I start paying more attention to that than I do to whatever is actually out there in reality. The painting becomes a part of who I am, and how I see the world, and the satisfaction doesn’t come from whether or not it’s good enough, but whether I succeeded in capturing a part of myself in the process.

Whenever I look for something to paint, I tend to go back to familiar landscapes and do them more than once. My favorite is The Point, where a rocky ledge angles down into the water just off the shore of Indian Lake, NY. The combination of the lake, the mountains beyond the far shore, and the pine trees that spike the sky is a scene I have painted many times in oil, watercolors, and acrylics. Another is a little island I can kayak to north of our camp. I sometimes paint it from the boat with watercolors, or take a lot of pictures to use as a reference for paintings when I am home. I always thought the reason I keep going back to these two scenes is because they are pleasing to the eye and easy to do for their simplicity, and as a basic form of composition, they represent the three most common elements that inspire me to paint them: sky, mountains, water. Now that I’ve painted them so often, I’ve come to realize that the real reason I choose the same scenes is not so much for the potential they might have for a good painting, but because each time I go back, I learn a little more about mixing colors, applying the paint and setting up the composition of the painting. I am teaching myself to paint, and trying to get it right. Hopefully, I can apply the lessons to fresh scenes in the future, but for now, I’m not willing to let go of The Point and The Little Island. They’ve been my best teachers.

“Learning what you cannot do is just as important as learning what you can do.” Robert Genn