Finding Purpose

I have mentioned on my Other Blog what my New Year Resolution might be, what I might blog about this year. In a round about way I am after the discussion, at least with myself, but I hope you join me, about perfection and knowing what you want out of life. When is enough, enough? and what to do when our own goals clash with what we want? These are not necessarily belief systems, nothing that deep. Just observations, what I see along the way. We can laugh along the way, especially if we get frightened, get lost, take a wrong turn somewhere. The key to all this will be to not take it all too seriously. What is at stake of course is our life and the very planet we live on. We are seven BILLION strong and eating up our resources like ameba's in a

primeval soup! God has given us everything and we just want more! We act as though the ticket to Heaven is tallied on a bank sheet and the path to Happiness is strewn with used appliances and, well, Things!
Time is related to this. We are always in a hurry. Time itself has become a "thing," an empty space to be filled up. Even on a vacation we set up an itinerary, must be here, must be there.
We can buy time and waste time and we use it quickly, hurrying to the end. What we don't have in our vocabulary is "relax time". I mean to enjoy doing nothing. To just take a deep breath and allow everything to be. If we could find five minutes for this we would get right back to business,
thinking deep in our hearts that we have "wasted time". This is in our DNA too. We somehow feel there is a purpose to all this and we must work hard to discover what it is. It is irony taken to the extreme. What if our purpose is simply appreciation?

On Canvas

Reinventing your life is a bit like flying with Peter Pan. It is the luxury of dreamers. It is definition in context.

It is always a translation of what you want me to be.

If you build a hundred good boats you will be known as the good boat builder. If you build one bad one you will gain a reputation as a bad boat builder.

Ultimately I am as you see me. I am nothing more than what you describe. I am a memory, a thought, an irritation, a cause to laugh, a source of strength and a moment of love.

I am both a cook and a bottle washer. I can be two things and maybe more. Definition is a question of emphasis. I can be a noun and a verb. I can wake up as Peter Pan or whoever I want to be. I am an Artist and if I were to build a bad boat I would simply rename it, call it something else. I have failed at things in life only to discover that they were not windows. They were doors. This blog is an offer for you to walk with me.

My Website is HERE.

Film on the Editing Room Floor

picked up in segments and scotch taped together, run through an old 8mm projector, often blurry and with that continuous clacking sound, that is how these memories appear. I don't get the pure uncut version, they are memories filtered through time and I am sure, tempered by who I am today. Someone once said that when telling a story, "start with the now". Between this and my other blog I have gone back and forth searching for the beginning. I have been searching deep in that pile of transparent cellulose, cutting and pasting and taping when maybe the answer was on the top of the pile all along!

The most incredible fantastic thing is that I am alive at all. I had stage "three and one half"

Hodgkin's Lymphoma that had spread to my spleen and spine. There is no such thing as stage 31/2 but the doctor wanted to offer some hope. I fought that hard battle and the day to day account of it is here. Okay, that is a whole damned website, but at the top, where it says, "BLOG", that is it.

Art plays a big part in the make up of me. I have always liked a challenge, not in a competitive

sporty kind of way, but a personal best, doing more or better than I did yesterday. And I just plain like to make things, this desk I am writing on and the studio in which it sits, the house I call home and everything in between.

Art became powerful when I was fifty years old and decided to make my living at it. I threw away a career I grew to hate, completing the jobs at hand and laying off my remaining employees. That summer I became unemployed. I became an Artist! A work at home artist with a studio in my backyard, and a little pool, and a greenhouse, and the most beautiful of gardens.

Shortening the story a bit, it was all pretty easy. I used all my construction experience and applied it to my art, inventing some things and reinventing others. My "stuff" was available at

five local shops and two more down the valley a bit. One year I decided to try the Galleries just

for fun, just to say I did it. That was easy too. In a town used to $300 garden arbors I introduced them to $3,500 ones, always bigger and better, never imported, I made these. When giant entry gates were ordered from three designs I offered my own, and art deco, design with art, not just framed fence panels. My biggest thrill to all of this was in encouraging my competition to step up and do a better job. I kept no secretes from them, would happily tell them everything I knew. One can only copy what I have done not what I will do tomorrow.

I enjoy teaching and encouraging and inspiring others, that has to be a big part of who I am.

I'll tell that story tomorrow!

Old Girlfriends

Never die, in fact they don't even age. Caught forever in a memory they remain as we knew them, youthful, romantic and full of strength. I don't go to High School Reunions because I wouldn't recognize all the old people there. It is interesting how we see ourselves and how others see us.

I don't have the soul of an artist, that quiet desperation, that always hunting for something that isn't there, a need for silence and isolation and with all this a determination to become famous. I don't paint into lonely hours nor find much significance in the torrential rains pounding on my shop roof, battering my garden. I am only thinking I need to fix the gutters.

My paintings are fast and furious, an experiment in extremism, colorful, loud, nonsensical, without meaning at all. They don't exist except in this computer, the internet cyber world and maybe outer space if they get sent by radio waves. I make them quickly and while still wet, photo them and do it again, painting over the one just finished maybe seven times. The last one

might live the longest, tossed into a corner of my shop until I need the metal it is painted on.

This doesn't mean they are bad, misbehaved in some way. In fact I have sold some and do have a few that made it into the house. It only means they are not proper, oil on canvas, framed,

ready to be hung, established style and acceptable for an art gallery. OMG! That is IT! That is who I am! Now, how in the Hell did I get here???

My other blog where I share this thought.