Forward from, "Portrait of a Seeker", my book-in-the-works

June 2011, in Saint-Médard sur Ille, Brittany, France

I am an artist, standing with raised brush and tilted head in front of my portrait, adding another stroke to my signature.  I have mixed paints, picked colors, followed feelings, left alone some things and painted over others.  Now I am signing my name on the lower right-hand corner: Seeker. 

Life comes in order, but is it orderly?  I’ve painted my sandcastle in one eternal summer day, the surf whispering its commentary into my ears while I added turrets and moats, destroyed bridges, improved walls and changed my mind. 

Some artists draw “studies” of the work they are going to feature on a canvas or ceiling, carefully considering composition and changing things until settling on how they are going to begin.  Other painters simply begin, following an impulse, adapting and improving as they work.  Another type, artist savant, lays down, intact, what was already there; a seeming instrument for the eternal creation.

This book is my painting of me and the world as I see it—maybe they’re the same.

You may search for an orderly structure within the following pages.  You may yearn for a chronological timeline or a developed context.  You can find them; they’re there. 

A person’s whole self, imbedded in the context of their life-as-lived, is impossible to hold within any frame; it would be a black canvas.  The whole “me” is best undiluted by description.  I have created this work, in this time in my life, and have stopped adding paint because it’s my soul, after all, and I don’t want to cover it up completely.

Our lives stop at the end of our day, and I wanted to say something before my sunset came because I have witnessed others, unwritten and unread, falling into their graves, to be covered by dirt. 

Here is a portrait of my fall.

 

  

—David Weimer, Flushing, Ohio, January 7, 2011.