I have several active Moleskine notebooks at the moment, and they are all starting to become more and more valuable to me as laboratories for ideas. Now that the holiday weekend is over and I am able to get back to the quiet solitude of the apartment, I opened my medium sized Moleskine; it was my large one until I found an even greater folio at the art supply store recently; and dashed off a quick watercolor idea. It was more of a reflection and I immediately became aware that I was pulling up information stored in my memory banks. The really fun thing about this is that I did not intend to choice to do this, at least not in an overt and conscious manner, however it is what came up.

The curve of the horizon and the color tone of the earth reminded me of the rolling hills south of Adelaide. There is a specific quality to the light in that part of the world that seemed to me to be portrayed in the first strokes of my brush and I was transported back to the highway that runs by the vineyards growing in route to the beaches. Dotting the hills like little pats of a dry brush the vines create a somewhat geometric pattern that is disturbed by the fuzzy unpredictable details of nature. When the land was not serving as a cultivated plot, the nature foliage gave the hills a lush green appearance and the they seemed in perfect concert with the sky that hovered just out of reach of all us beings trapped upon the surface of this planet.

This is the first dash of my brush in the morning and this is what happens nearly everytime, I drag a brush through pigment, something inside my head becomes activated an emotion or a memory of an emotion is revived and live is lived or relived through the experience of painting. It is certainly something which I do not wish to extinguish, nor to I really believe that I could.