I’m heavily in-love with watercolor paints. Yellows and sea greens. Purple. I’ve done a lot with faces, but no eyes. I haven’t been able to get the eyes right. So I either leave them out or, instead, use words as eyes.

I was worried that by wanting to paint I’d abandon my photography. Or the need for it, really. Photography has always been poetry in motion for me. A still frame of all the little versus I was thinking. Or feeling. I didn’t want painting to replace that.

Turns out it hasn’t, it won’t. All those photos I took and keep taking are just what learning to paint looks like. When seeing something “in my mind” is just as easy as looking through my back-log of photographs. All these images, saved for when the time was right. Or wasn’t, but it’s now. The time is now.

I read this the other day and I loved it:

It’s my job to do the work, not to judge the work.

Not just painting or learning to draw. Not just writing or taking photos. Not just cooking or playing music, running a marathon or singing or acting or any of those things we feel calling us from the deep within. But everything. All of it, all at once. Do it. Do the work.

It matters.