Luckily, the holidays are for dreaming, for sitting, reading, walking in the snow, and looking at the sunset. I had the good luck to stumble upon an small, out-of-print book titled, "To Paint, Is To Love Again" by Henry Miller. Miller used painting as a way to replenish his senses, when he was tired of writing.
He brings us back to the importance of life and seeing: "A picture… is a thousand different things to a thousand different people. Like a book,a piece of sculpture, or a poem. One picture speaks to you, another doesn’t… Some pictures invite you to enter, then make you a prisoner. Some pictures you race through, as if on roller skates. Some lead you out by the back door. Some weigh you down, oppress you for days and weeks on end. Others lift you up to the skies, make you weep with joy or gnash your teeth in despair."
And he appreciates painting, reminding me that there is no time like the present to paint. If you're depleted in one area, switch to another form of expression: "To paint is to love again. It’s only when we look with eyes of love that we see as the painter sees. His is a love, moreover, which is free of possessiveness. What the painter sees he is duty-bound to share. Usually he makes us see and feel what ordinarily we ignore or are immune to. His manner of approaching the world tells us, in effect, that nothing is vile or hideous, nothing is stale, flat and unpalatable unless it be our own power of vision. To see is not merely to look. One must look-see. See into and around." May 2016 be filled with painting times.
Standing at the point on New Year's. Photo by Nathaniel Welch