This week I tore down the aging tomato plants and picked what I think may be the last of my chard and kale. I thought as I did this about the pictures that had enchanted me in the seed catalogue (compared to what actually grew). My gardening skills are improving, but never have I bought some seed according to a picture and then found the reality to be quite as good. If I were a seed farmer I might call myself a “seller of hope.” The potential is there in the seed for the pictures promised, they aren’t lying, these seed sellers; but time and entropy, as well as droughts and bugs work against my final harvest.

There is something like that working in my art. I often have big ideas and unfinished pictures in my head. I am after representations and ideas that have enchanted, that are inspired by the glimpses I catch in the landscape or off on the horizon. But what comes onto the paper or the panel works through the mesh of my abilities and inabilities, and is often only a fragment of something far grander that I can hardly grasp let alone visualize. This piece is a cropped excerpt from one effort that was successful. I call it “Hint of the Holy” for that is what beauty is to me: a beckoning appetizer toward a meal coming that is beyond my imagination and certainly my ability. Can you see a hint of that here?