all one can do is be oneself

 I have spent days on the web looking at how people paint, watching instructive videos, looking through books. The videos show me how to do it, what steps I should take to improve and frankly it is exhausting. It even figures in my dreams. But I did find a link, well maybe a link which was a teaching moment . So the link is, William Coldstream, Euan glow, Ann Gale. If you get a moment..

There is a story about the Chassidic Master Zusia. As he lay dying, he was crying and his students asked him, "Reb Zusia, why are you so sad? He responded by saying that "when I go to Heaven, God will not ask me why I was not more like Moses or King Solomon. No, God will ask me,"Why were you not more like Zusia"

So after all of that, it is the question I must ask of myself. Why am I not more like me ? 

Everywhere one looks there is a wealth of information, years and years of effort, a cornucopia of thought and practice and yet in the end one can only be oneself.The job is the job and integrity is all or nothing.

I am engaged in the painting, for the first time in my life, of two portraits, a friend and my wife. I have spent so much time on myself, on the passing of time, of introspection and inspection that I thought that ,if not a simple transition, it would be something that would be familiar. I was wrong, so, so wrong. It feels as if I have never looked before and as if all the things that I have been looking at to reassure me have only revealed to me what it is that I don't want to do. Yet it seems that I am fact making things that do not please me and that my application of paint is hamstrung which is frustrating as the paint is essential and maybe more important than the image. The brush does not help because it causes marks that are known and brings about familiar images and of course I have already learnt that the head is never familiar once one really looks.