Assignments

...is what I give myself.  I am still in the fun stages of learning to paint and don't really know what I am doing.
I have no teacher, no mentor looking over my shoulder and guiding me along the way.  No helpful hints.
I am not really painting anything, just learning what a particular brush will do and what I am capable of doing with it.  My painting is getting heavy from the layer upon layer, thick with ideas, changes as something catches my eye and needs attention.  Nothing is deleted.  Every idea, each misstep along the way is there under layers of paint, one stroke covering another.
   I have forgotten nothing in my life.  Experience and reaction all along the way, each episode, like layers of paint are embossed onto the canvas of my brain.
   I am playing with shapes and colors and shadows, clouds that become fog, trees that lose their definition in a forest.  I think of the painting of a painter painting the painting of a painter painting a painting...of a painter painting a painting and I wonder whether I am trying to say anything?

   The process is different from welding and it is very much the same.  You stay at it until you get good at it or you abandon it altogether.  That is pretty simple and straight forward.