Last painting--

I finished one more painting this morning before packing up.
All told, I began 15 paintings here, finished 12--and have a large collage well underway.
I walked A LOT--including a nine mile hike three days ago.
I finished Murakami's book on writing and running and am more than half-way through The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle--an extraordinary book.
I met eight other artists and writers--and I'm a bit sad to say goodbye as their joy and generosity and overall delight in making and writing was such a boost to my own studio practice.
I ate some extraordinary meals here--prepared by Rae, the Hambidge chef who makes the most amazing macaroni and cheese I've ever tasted.
I feel calm, but also buoyant.  I've regained an ease toward painting--and a delight in just seeing what happens on the canvas.  I've remembered that it's only painting after all; and so in that lightness, I've been able to call up (through the movement of my own hands) what I believe is painting's necessity--a purely visual, no-words-needed, reminder of what MIGHT be--what I intuit and sense of the world that is never just laid out before me, there for the looking.  These realities must be found, carved out via the manipulation of the most endlessly mutable of mediums.