Arrival

Originally Settlement, or even The German Cottage--but the connotations are wrong. Winter in any case, and a gathering of known elements. The center-board sloop--I can see the shape of the hull from when I was 15, but here it's merged with a boat from China. The figures--smudges, erased again and again, with the one in front with bowed head (how you can make this out, even at a distance) and the implied path from shore to home. A rather schematic home--the angle of address says more than anything--the way the front facade faces the water, set back amidst trees. Something of Stillwater Ranch here (our place on the Sonoma Coast), although the rounded dormer always feels German. A squarish box, nonetheless.

The brush stroke to the left--at the moment of lift-off, but I couldn’t sense where it wanted to go, so I left it as a smudge. Begins the progression, in any case. Light yellow patch--Naples Yellow--always personally evocative, to mix those colors--yellow oxide and zinc white. The grays wandered back and forth as well, repeating the contours, covering them over--each moment a small finale and a new beginning...

I doubted it entirely--why this fairy-tale scale? Who am I kidding? But the unfolding seemed right, in the moment at least--and that's what you have to go with. Maybe to be understood on a scale of gentleness--this quality doesn't photograph, but I saw it again this morning, on first glance, and was reassured.

To trust each moment--or to change them, one by one?