I was asked a question today that I’ve been asked many times-
With a gesture towards a recent painting;
Two old trees stretching toward each other, their branches intermingling in a riot of life force and communication, the sky a brilliant neon pink, the landscape melting out of the sky and then melting again onto the canvas.
“What were you thinking with this one?”

It’s usually asked in a setting of white walls, affixed with price tags. I sometimes hear the REAL question even louder than the spoken one, “what does it mean to you to make a painting, to be an artist?” “Why this price?” Or it could even be, “What is it about this picture that is dragging me across the room?” Or, “What do I need to do as an artist to make work like this?”
(Or even, let’s face it, the far more insidious insinuation that true art somehow arises out of cool and rational intellect, that somehow what anyone could say about the work would be far more important than the work itself.)
So I’m never sure what to say, do I answer the spoken or unspoken question? Do I explain the whole history of art- ALL art, not just paintings?
I always want to answer a question as honestly as I can.
Sometimes I want to say what I gleaned from it later, what secrets about myself it whispered to me in the turning shadows on the wall.
But at this moment my head was hurting and I hadn’t yet had my coffee, so with fingers pressed to my face I said out loud to myself,
“Oh yeah…people always want a story.”

Realizing immediately I had possibly insulted her with my droll attitude, I quickly tried to appease her with a true story, chosen at random.

“When I look at this one now, I think of the importance of having good friends, how they inspire you to enjoy life, how your thoughts and beliefs grow together with theirs” which certainly was one of the things I was appreciating that day…
(I had noticed later how that thought had seeped in to the work, as I went to give it a title).
But even had I chosen to answer the direct question, it could have still been two different answers. On the one hand I am in the moment of appreciation with the subject and the paint on the canvas, present with them, appreciating them, but I’m thinking very little other than “I love that, and I love that and I love that” (with moments of electric elation where my body seems to fly off the earth, interspersed”)
Once a painting is done it as much a mystery to me as to anyone how it appeared. Who thought to use those colors next to each other? Who made these decisions? How on earth were they executed? (“What were you thinking, Miles, when you wrote “Kind of Blue”?)
It’s as if I’m a stranger to them, meeting them for the first time. I get the impression that my mind must have been very far away, and if someone was intending something it couldn’t have been me, I just carefully did my job as I would do any job. I plucked notes from the singing air, I smiled at someone.
Another and perhaps better way to put it is this:

“It was a fine moment. I put together a picnic, gathered my gloves and hat, my snippers and baskets and ladder and I walked down to the orchard. I had a marvelous time picking apples until the baskets were full. Would you like an apple? They’re in season.”