I saw a gallery of illustration paintings in oil. A man I know, said, "Why not just take photographs?" Extremely, obsessively, realistic, I guess you would label it, but I don't know. I think of the time required to paint such realistic work and then I think I wish I was in the mind of the artist as he painted it. IT is commercial work to be sold, contracts, commissions to be made, yes, is this the motivation? I look at it and think to myself, as any artist I think might, maybe not any, and I ask myself, "Could I paint something like this?" And then I ask, "Do I want to paint something like this?" And then I say, "I think if I painted something like this I wouldn't be able to find myself in it, I am not clean stroked, I am not polished, I am not straight line, I am a mess, I am clumsy, shaky hand at 21, anxious when I know I shouldn't be anxious in anything, I would not want to paint you, no, I couldn't, not now." I think an artist wants at least one human being to look at the work, just look, and maybe they even walk away thinking nothing, or maybe they don't walk away for a long while, their face violently sways like a tree in storm. I think the ultimate desire is, an artist wants to speak to the world, not just to a particular class of people who will open their wallots. I think an artist knows, too, that when being an artist, chances are good that struggle and pain and loss will happen, it is life. I think what has drawn me to being an artist is this very reason, though I know I will cry out like Job and scratch the walls like dieing lepers, but it is the unexpectedness, that which we do not know, the miracle that we believe will happen, and the overwhelming joy we will then feeL, like receiving a letter, a poem you read a hundred times, and you cry because you know these words are words of another human being to you, for you, or for the world, all at once, and the ground begins to move, the world is no longer the same, though the world may not know it, but the world must believe great works are being created by few, and that it is in the few of things that love happens, and the world must let it happen, let it happen, so the world can see the renewal of all things, the glory in faces across from us on the bus, that man speaking to himself in a cryptic language of his own, a beautiful world he has found, suffering maybe the doctors say, but something has to be beautiful about it, something we can never know, we only can know the beauty that has been instilled in us for some unknown reason, but it is just there, and we know that beauty, we protect that beauty, we love and hate that beauty, but even in our hating it, we are only loving it more.