My closest friends know that web design and information work is not my passion in life. If anything, they're interesting pursuits, but I'm not exactly passionate about either. When Robin and I met, one of the first things she wanted to know about me was "what I was passionate about". The answer is easy. Although I've not been consistent about doing it myself, art -- and painting in particular -- has always been one of the things for me that makes life worth living. I was an Art History major in college. These last few months, I've been taking a painting class. It's the first painting class I've ever taken and is wonderful and frustrating at the same time. I feel like someone who's meeting himself for the first time.

It's difficult because in the few drawing classes I've taken -- I never took art formally in high school or college -- I managed to develop some extremely rigid habits, mostly having to do with focussing a bit much on proportion an anatomy. Somewhere in those lessons, I lost the ability to feel something as I created images on the paper. The passion was missing.

There was a lot of fear that stood in the way of me taking this class. I've taken design and photography courses in a half-serious way since graduating library school, but never before have I felt myself immersed in any of them. The decision to make this important now is big because with it comes the risk of looking more deeply inside. It is uncovering in the expression, the parts of my self that have been buried by the many layers of social and cultural guidelines and accepted behaviors. My teacher now has been good at reminding and urging me to focus on that part of the expression. Sensing the apprehension in my work, he says to me, "No one will get hurt here". I'm unsure whether that's true or not.

Incidentally, he's also very good at constantly reminding me to step back and paint as a unit. He's asked me to write him a letter telling him what art means to me. I'm still writing that letter and am not sure entirely what I will tell him, but somewhere in there, it must have something to say about being free and comfortable with who I am.

We haven't gotten to oil painting yet and have been focussing on drawing with charcoal and cray pas. As I learn to draw and paint I'll be posting some of my work on flickr.

What's also interesting to me is how much I've gotten interested in expressive artists that I didn't particularly gravitate towards in the past. I've recently been seeking out good books (with lots of plates) on Egon Shiele, Lucian Freud, Edgar Degas. This is a far way away from what I've normally liked looking at. I have a very different appreciation for artists who paint figures expressively now. The nice thing is I can go to museums and galleries with a whole new eye and interest. Everything will be new to me again.