Painting Paint

An Ojai afternoon, a matcha smoothie, sun and blue sky, an afternoon at Bart's Books, a fabulous outdoor bookstore. In the writing of this road trip, sometimes an image spurred a story and sometimes a story went looking for an image. Sometimes what might have been a great photo came out blurry, or a great story didn't have a place to fit. There were things I left out and things I put in, and the story of the journey became a journey of its own.

David Leffel says that one mistake painters make is they think they're painting an orange or a rose or a sky when really they're painting paint. We can get so caught up in our efforts to capture the likeness of an external object, the orange or the rose or the sky, that we forget we are creating something new altogether. Not an orange, but a painting of an orange made by painting paint. 

Born from a combination of your original vision (sky) and what you have to work with (earth), a new creation is right there in front of you, yet it can be so hard to see. The fear that you'll fail your original vision makes it hard to move, and is why most people give up on creating.

Again and again on this journey I discovered that my questions, whether about painting or writing or enlightenment brought me full circle, to answers that were really quite simple. What you're looking for is right in front of you. Not easy, but simple.