Beginning Again

Thich Nhat Hanh has quite a bit written on this topic, beginning again. If memory serves me, he uses it in reference to relationships, to forgiving others, setting aside the past, and beginning again. It's about being open, loving, available. We need some of this as we approach our art work also. We need to take the time to set aside our failures, burning them if we need to, and start again, to rediscover our path, to recover what it was about art that brought us to it in the first place.

Today I am looking out my window at the grey sky, some intermittent streaks of snow, and the brown/gray/olive drab/ocher vegetation that stretches across the swamp outside my window. I love brown, wet landscapes, fuzzy indistinct masses, things that are half seen and obscured by distance and a lattice of branches. I don't know why. My task today is to find out why, by sketching in oil this thing that I love, to do a simple sketch, not a grandiose operatic scale mural, just a small sketch of honest reaction to what is there. I'm thinking that tomorrow, I will begin again and do another. I will remember how to work the paint, how to mix the colors, how to set up the gear. It is, in many ways, a dry run for working outside in the “great out of doors”, this set up. In the process, I found a 140ml tube of titanium white I had forgotten I had and realized my French easel did not have paintbrushes in it. It took me 40 minutes to figure out how the palette extension attached. But here I am, beginning again, trying to remember why I am an artist, what it was that fascinated me, captured me, about paint, and to forgive myself for my failings, for not being everything I want to be, for betraying the very thing I love by not spending yet more time at it for little or no reward and forgiving the world for not knowing that I am here and giving me my due.