sketchbook

surprised a napping fawn in the meadow

sketchbook

a crow stole an egg from our dove residents

“It isn’t about being entertaining or pretty,” he said, taking a drag on his cigar. “Art is about expanding intelligence and broadening the viewer’s capacity to understand the world.”
Pedro Cabrita Reis

“I would say that I’ve tried, in my work, to find out how to live life — tried to explore what our existence really is and the meaning of it.”
Martin Scorsese

"Novelists are like fur trappers. They disappear into the north woods for months or years at a time, sometimes never to reemerge, giving in to despair out there, or going native (taking a real job, in other words), or catching their legs in their own traps and bleeding out, silently, into the snow. The lucky ones return, laden with pelts."

Jeffrey Eugenides

"I will close with what Meadow once told me about being an artist. It is partly a confidence game. And partly magic. But to make something you also need to be a gleaner. What is a gleaner? Well, it is a nice word for a thief, except you take what no one wants. Not just unusual ideas or things. You look closely at the familiar to discover what everyone else overlooks or ignores or discards."
Dana Spiotta from Innocents and Others

"They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night"
Edgar Allen Poe

“When I seek, I look, look, look….”
Benoit Mandelbrot

"Soul is the master,
and matter its natural subject."
Plato

"The Good Earth"

from the collection of Rene & Paul

"Life passes into pages if it passes into anything. I like to write about certain things that if they are not written about are not going to exist."- James Salter

Nick Paumgarten says about Salter- "You come away from his work wondering if you should have lived more, even if living more, in his work, often leads to ruin."

"Marina"

22x16"

"I wanted everything I learned to be an opening into the unknown, whereas Gerry's knowledge added up to a closed circle, bringing him safely back to where he began, confirming him."
-Tessa Hadley from her short story Valentine

“The role of the art is to accept that things break down. That’s the only way to get something new to emerge.” Per Kirkeby

"The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself."

Sherwood Anderson

"When you're writing, you're trying to find out something which you don't know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don't want to know. What you don't want to find out. But something forces you to anyway."
James Baldwin

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."
Douglas Adams

"You're not a failure," she told him one day. "No. You're not even embittered. Not like one of those East Europeans, people like Cioran and the rest. You're just unlucky. Like someone... like someone who..." (she was searching for the word and he was wild with gratitude: she's understood me, I'm not a professional failure!)---"That's it. You're like an undetonated shell with its devastating power intact. You're an explosion still waiting to be heard."
Andrei Makine from The Life of an Unknown Man

Eddie helped paint the porch...

When I get the sense that a new book is beginning, I start a notebook into which I put anything that might seem relevant, which could be a large-scale plot idea, something overheard on the bus, or a descriptive phrase that came to me on a walk. I don't actually start writing that book until out of all this has emerged a pretty clear plan for the whole thing. I can't just start writing and see what happens. Of course improvisation is an important part- I would find it dreadfully boring if I planned everything. What keeps you going are the discoveries you make in the course of writing."

Alan Hollinghurs, from an interview in The Paris Review