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Ruminations, part 5

 Last April, we were sitting on the porch in the late afternoon with a glass of wine,  having a non-imaginary conversation.  He mentioned what it was like to paint Pecan Harvest, a small recent painting I had considered (to myself) one of The Orphans – a little cast-off group of “wallflower” paintings not in a gallery yet.

“That’s the way I always want to paint,” he said. “It was fast and powerful and fun.” 

“You were in the zone,” I said, using our word for Nirvana.

“I guess.”

Later, when I was alone, I spent some time with Pecan Harvest.  I saw what he was talking about, something I had totally missed because of my preconceptions about size and light and color.  I saw the spontaneous impressionist movement, the life, the powerful excellence – I could FEEL him zoning as he painted it. 

There he is now, in my imagination, sitting at his painting table wielding a fine-point watercolor brush loaded with blacky-green paint, commanding that pecan basket to arrive, appear, show up, materialize.  And it obeys. 

He looks up at me, happy.

“This is what it means, too,” he says. “The how as much as the what.”