For 45 years, I lived inside language. As a journalist, essayist, and screenwriter, I learned that the deepest work is never really about the words themselves — it's about what lies beneath them, the current running under the surface that the right sentence tries, imperfectly, to catch. I wrote for publications as different as The Nation and The Humanist and Men's Journal, and I wrote books — Bode: Go Fast... and Brush Cat — each one a different kind of reckoning with the world. I also wanted to paint. But I understood early on that you cannot chase two obsessions at full
speed. You have to choose. I chose writing because it could feed me. I gave it everything I had.
Now, at 69, I paint. What I've discovered is that everything I learned about writing — the discipline, the willingness to begin without knowing where you're going, the tolerance for failure, the long patience required before something true appears — turns out to have been preparation for this. A writer and a painter are after the same thing. They just use different lies to get at the truth. Abstract painting suits me because abstraction is what I always trusted most. Not the literal. Not the explained. The thing that means something before you can say what it means — the image
that lands in the body before it reaches the brain. I spent decades finding words for what couldn't quite be said. Now I don't have to find the words at all.
I've never been happier.
We use cookies to analyze website traffic and optimize your website experience. By accepting our use of cookies, your data will be aggregated with all other user data.