After Momma gave birth to twelve of us kids, we put her up on a pedestal. It was mostly to keep Daddy away from her.
I paint the fog - I think of its fresh moistness - its stillness - its mystery.
I paint the ocean - I think of its vastness - its power - its wetness.
I am the thing that I am painting at the time of painting.
I paint a tree - I think of how the roots go deep, deep into the earth. How the tree grows year by year toward the sky. How it stands with the winds.
I paint a mountain - I think of its age - the strata formations or what grows on the mountain.
Each day brought just another minute of the things they could not leave behind. Jane Barrington sitting on the train coming back to Leningrad from Moscow, holding on to her son, knowing she had failed him, crying for Alexander, wanting another drink, and Harold, in his prison cell, crying for Alexander, and Yuri Stepanov on his stomach in the mud in Finland, crying for Alexander, and Dasha in the truck, on the Ladoga ice, crying for Alexander, and Tatiana on her knees in the Finland marsh, screaming for Alexander, and Anthony, alone with his nightmares, crying for his father.
Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever.
Since the day man first tried to conquer space, the earth has been mobilizing.
Some men are more perfect than others.