"The more you walk this road, the farther you are from the ordinary ways of society. You may see the truth, but you will find that people would rather listen to politicians, performers, and charlatans." -Deng Ming-Dao * I'm struck by the difficulty we have sticking to the basics. Continually struck by our insistence on increasing complication at the expense of living with complexity. We spin-out plans and tune the details of our elaborate procedures, remaining deaf and blind to the lack of any vital foundations for our actions and intentions, our expectations. I keep feeling the unease of the young boy I once was. Surrounded by frantic activity as the adults who were taking care of me strove to do this or that while oblivious to the madness of their actions, considering how they never even questioned the great gaps into which our lives were falling. I still can feel my hand pressing against the hood of a taxi braking hard to stop as my mother rushed my little brother and me across the busiest avenue in Lisbon against the light. This feeling of unease – an unease as obvious to me even then as their obliviousness – persisted and formed a foundation for a chronic depression which has only lifted in the past decade. Some fifty years after that particular incident…. I cannot help but see the same upside-down quality in everything that surfaces in this culture of ours as we strive to rush against the light. We want to solve all these problems. Yet we insist there's no time to slow-down and find out where we actually are before rushing off. Painting, as with any practice, is a constant reminder that there is no elaboration. Only the basics ever matter. No proud intention or eager expectation of a particular result will ever get you anywhere beyond a weak hash of things that can only delude you so long as you are pushing ahead lost in your projections instead of looking with fresh eyes at what is actually there. There is a surface. Colored goos. Some brushes or knives or sticks. Or even just your fingers. At each moment as you make something happen on some part of the whole everything is constantly changing. So often what at first appears to be a lack in one part is actually remedied by changing another. There is a certain progression – in the sense that one thing follows another, not that there is Progress!™. At first there is a freshness and almost unlimited possibility. Then there are stages of confusion and false starts and wished-for but unrealized consolidations. At some point the lights begin to go on. That's how it feels to see what had been a jumble of marks and colors and shapes and values transformed into the beginning of a sense of light and space. Not separate. Together. A space infused with light. The marks no longer standing for themselves. They hold form and light and depth. There are