I guess you could say that there are three basic efforts in my current art practice. They look quite different to most viewers. Maybe it looks as if three different artists share my name and life:

1. working on children’s picture books to be published (my day job)
2. a daily practice of nature drawings of birds and landscapes (my in-between job)
3. imaginative doodles and paintings in sketchbooks (my wee hours of the night/early morning job)

I ask for your indulgence: It’s this third category I want to talk about. Lately, it’s become difficult to sustain in an energetic way because the cats interrupt my process. It’s 6:00 a.m. and they plaintively meow at the door. I’m afraid they’ll wake up the sleeping house so I let them in. And pretty soon, I’ve relinquished my rocking chair and watercolors to them and I go check email across the room. oon it’s time to go outside and draw the ducks (my other job).

The end result, right now, is a meandering knowledge of the importance of this pre-feline art-making. But I have a less precise sense of the direction it’s going in or why it goes at all. However, I do feel that these warm-up exercises are important. Significant insights and ideas have emerged in the past and I assume will in the future. Until then, we have odds and ends.