Paint what you know. Paint what you love. Look around you. Blah, blah, blah. So much advice, but finding my own muse?

I've always been drawn to abstraction, even while producing saleable paintings of the southwest - adobes and New Mexico scenes. As for Picasso, Pollock, Diebenkorn, what are they saying? Anything or just experimenting, having fun, following their noses?

My muse spoke to me on a sidewalk in Albuquerque NM. At my feet was a sidewalk patch which became inspiration for a series of paintings, variously entitled "pavement series" or "view from above". I began to capture digital images of cracked and broken pavement sections as I walked about. Wonder, you might - "how can he derive inspiration from broken pavement - Yuck?" But artists take their inspiration from many uncommon sources!

Now a word about "series". The artist takes an idea or concept and paints it in various forms many times. Nationally known artist Kathryn Chang Liu says that a series is not five paintings - a series is thirty paintings. Currently my series is twenty and reaching for thirty. But by the time I completed fifteen or twenty of the same series my vision seemed to be receding. "What can I do next with this?" However, forging on allows me, or any artist, to fail, to make false starts and, finally, to break new ground. So hopefully my vision will be distilled and polished into concepts and methods which foster paintings conveying my feeling that beauty is all around us if we can just see.

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