On my run this morning i was thinking about what paintings are to me. On good days, they are merely the remains of a search for a better way to capture the life around me in paint. I see painting as very similar to story telling (aka writing). It is as old as human beings are. It is the same old everything but every generation is able to reinvent these things. People say that painting is dead at times or that the exciting stuff is happing in video or where ever - my feeling is that those things are great areas for expression but for me painting is where i want to be discussing what I find important. Painting is completely malleable and can be changed to meet the needs of every generation. I am very eager to spend my time trying to capture that essence of what it means to paint in the 21st century. And my paintings are just the left overs of that search. I think the reason we tend to hold certain artists up is that we sense in their work an honest search for a truth (which is usually unattainable) and the art work is just what was jettisoned on the way to that truth by the artist. As I work through all these paintings - usually 3 a day - i realized that i don't have time to get precious with them or to look at them that much. They just get left behind.

ok this is serious enough! So yesterday I decide that after painting a whole lot of paintings I would go on long bike ride. It's all nice - lots of cliche views of France - for example

and i'm heading farther and farther away. It's so nice and the sun's out and the birds are singing and it's all great. I ride for an hour out of town on top of a giant plateau. I decide it'll take me an hour to get back so i stop to turn around and head back. well remember that wind i kept mentioning? Yeah well it had been at my back the whole time and i didn't know it. so it was like swimming to get back to the house - it was a lot slower coming back. beware the back wind