This 72 year old artist often feels the horizon pulling closer, the once-distant line now brushing against the edges of his days. No longer in a hurry or feeling pressed to create, the creative juices flow, but not like a raging river . . . rather as a broad expanse in no hurry to get anywhere.
Especially since moving to Mexico, I see how my art has transformed and now, it is as if I have climbed a high mountain and can look back to vast territories my journey has taken me through. Fortunately I have kept records. Slides from before the digital age have been in boxes. A life’s worth of images—photos of four decades of work, sketches on scraps of paper, grainy shots of exhibitions long past. Each a fragment of a story, a frame in the reel of becoming.
Recently I have been re-making the website that bears my name. My art collectors might be bewildered at the stark shift in my subject matter since moving to Mexico. For public pleasure, I have made a movie, piecing together and crafting a film that spans four decades of artmaking.
It is strange, this act of looking back. I had to explore many territories before stopping to look back. The artist once lived only for the present canvas, the immediate stroke, the urgency of now. But in this reflection, he finds a quiet pride—life not measured in mere years but in creations—in every brushstroke, every finished piece, every fragment of beauty left for the world.
As the final credits roll, the work will carry forward, long after I am gone. I have given all I could, and perhaps that is an artist’s greatest triumph: to leave behind a world more beautiful than he found it.