Three Weeks To Take Off.....

"Lucklessly she must lie patient

And the vaulting bird be still. O my true love, hold me.

In your every inch and glance is the globe of genesis spun,

And the living earth your sons."

Dylan Thomas

Three weeks left and then I rome, after close to two years grounded and working. When on the Missouri River, madly paddling for St. Louis a thousand miles away, there was ample time to check my reality; what I was doing as a man of twenty-nine and what I hoped to accomplish in my life time. There was plenty of time for reflexions like these to the rhythm of paddle strokes, the twisting river or the far horizon stretched out across the lakes. I grappled with my feelings of how only my painting seemed keep a hold of me, the rest didn't seem to make a lot of sense. It is easy to talk to God when you find your self in a vast landscape, when you are but a speck bobbing through the Great Plains. So talk I did and I spoke my needs. If I was to be a full time artist I needed direction. A month later I found it, though at the time I didn't know it.

It is said to be careful of what you ask for in life for you just might get it. I have been listening to Homer's Iliad and there is a story of a man who is given one wish from a god. He asks the god to make everything he touches turn to gold. He is amazed at how it works, it is so beautiful and the gold so pure and rich. He knows he will soon be the richest man in the world, all he has to do is go on touching his surroundings. Then he finds out that he can't eat gold, this proved a problem do to the fact that you have to touch to eat. He asks the god to take it away and he was granted his second wish as well. In three weeks I will be leaving for my first One Man Art show at a gallery in Brownsville Nebraska. From there I am not sure were the road may lead me. The last year and a half I have been in a long distance mentorship with my artist friend Harry Waldemar Anderson, who is a resident of Brownsville. Over this time period he has helped me grow in my abilities as an artist and as he says there is little more he can teach me at this point. I have also massed over eighty pieces of work, fifty of those piece will go into the gallery showing. On looking back I had no idea what I was asking for when I made my prayers over the river, I had no idea of the painful hours upon hours of trying to work out a problem. I had no idea what I would have to give up to take hold of my dream yet I am not asking for it back ether like the guy with the golden touch. There is a road to travel and I just have to travel it. It could be only for curiosities sake.