This is a painting of my Dad’s house. I helped renovate that house,  reframed the barn, nailed the shingles on the wall, installed the weather vane, made a rhinosaurus sculpture for the wood shed, helped cut and stack the wood, and now I’ve done a watercolor of the whole thing. You don’t have to go far for inspiration; there is something within reach all the time. You can paint something you thought about, played with, built, or worked on. It’s just another angle on the same thing. You might call it small minded, provincial, self-absorbed, or you could call it appreciation of things around you, seeing wonder in the small things, and living with your eyes open. If creativity is a state of mind then every act is its expression. I wonder which act was the more creative, the carpentry, the wood chopping, the sculpture, the painting , or this write up?

Self-examination can be as enlightening as travel, maybe more so. In photography, stepping to one side one foot before clicking the shutter can change the entire perception, shape, angle, or feeling of the image; similarly in life stepping to one side in some way will change your experience. Spending enough time in one place is an important aspect of wringing greater meaning from the mundane. In the everyday stuff we can find inspiration by checking it out from different points of view. Hopefully if you traveled around the world you would learn to look at things from more than one standpoint, not just racing around and glancing at things superficially. Hopefully we can do the same thing right where we are. Sometimes I feel like a monk, limited to a small world, staring at my belly button, in contrast to others that travel far and wide, those who escape the cold Maine winter and go to warmer climates, but life goes on in the winter in this place that seems left behind. I travel in a different way, maybe only one foot, and make observations.

The fun part about painting snow is the soft blend from paint to the white of the paper. It shows off watercolor’s ability to blur in a puddle of water. The effect is kind of mesmerizing, like watching waves or a fire. You can let your eyes rove over the surfaces of paint that blends so smoothly you can’t really see the brush strokes. I can look over it without getting bored, just like I was looking at surf on a beach. Add a drop of different pigment into a wet paint area and the two colors mix without the brush. The blend is fresh, straight forward, and more intriguing than something you stir together. The simplicity of the paint is its own magic.