Many painters paint what they see. Sitting on a hillside, they paint a barn, a street scene, the turn of a beautiful cheek on a young lady with her Starbucks cup. Others paint what was seen. A photographed is propped up and copied. Sometimes what is painted is what another has seen, a photograph of a distant place, a celebrity long gone is painted.
I paint what I want to see. I create scenes. Once upon a time, I saw illustrations for fairytales and I must have been indelibly marked. I see a tree, a rock, a shell and I want to see it on the beach, in the wind or looming up to startle.
I am not looking to change the world but just to create a little sliver of it that I can imagine and hang out in for awhile. Most people will just walk by – or scroll by – my work with just a glance and think “Oh pretty rock! I saw one like that in Bermuda…” and not give another thought. But there may be some who stop and hang out in my little corner of a universe for just a minute.
And if you do, stop and wave. And thank you.