Can’t remember for sure. It was either my 39th or 40th birthday … when I started painting. Prior to that … nada. Unless you count some drawing in high school. Oddly, the first two paintings I did were pretty decent — both portraits. The third was a … sort of landscape. And for several years afterwards, I rendered this image constantly … Lord knows how many times. This is the first one, and the only version I still have. It’s painted on the first canvas I ever stretched.
At the time I thought of it less as a landscape, and more as an autobiography. A longitudinal self portrait … with the three phases of my adult life. First, new in the world of adulthood — working in broadcasting and research. Next, morphing out of that world, and learning to paint. And (although I’m still learning to paint) I think of myself in the third phase now — living as an artist. As I predicted all those years ago, this is the brightest phase of my life. Scarier than the previous incarnations, but vastly more rewarding.
