At least counting recently, this is something of an artistic liberty. Painting is not a day in my life. Perhaps it was. Perhaps it will be. But it hasn’t been recently. I don’t paint nearly as much as I’d like and I have no good excuse for that. If I would like to do it more – paint, that is – I should just do it more. It’s really a matter of two things. First is preparation. I paint in the kitchen. It has the best light and tiled floors. But that’s not terribly convenient. I have tried painting on the balcony but this doesn’t work out so well. The light changes too much. And bugs get stuck in my paintings. The second matter is storage. I huddle in a very busy crowded apartment. I have already revealed that I collect everything — more for inspiration and materials for drawings or paintings than as talismans for any kind of sentiment or nostalgia. So if I produced paintings I think I should have to give them all away because I have very little storage and not nearly enough wall space as I would like. I am breaking a large principle of living here: Never defend yourself unless you’ve been accused.

Acrylics are cleaner and faster. But I don’t like the way they shine. I don’t like the quickness they require. I have always preferred oils which are much harder to deal with in a bachelor apartment. You need some kind of solvent-type cleaner. You can get that stinkless. But you shouldn’t really put that stuff down the drain so I end up having shopping bags full of oily rags.

I love painting. I get lost for hours. I can pass a whole day, a whole night without any sense of time passing. It’s a beautiful feeling. Unlike a lot of people, I love the smell of oil paints. I paint in my underwear. It’s not some sort of tribal or primal ritual. It’s just easier that way.

I paint, more or less photorealistic, which is never, as far as I’m concerned, a very artistic enterprise. It might be technically demanding but painting a thing to look like a thing is mostly an outmoded art form when a photograph could do the job quicker and in some cases better. My critics, however, perhaps because they are friends and kind, say that I play with light and color in a very aesthetic way that a photograph wouldn’t accomplish.

I have a file of paintings I want to paint. If I started today I could paint for a year without running out of ideas.

A year ago I was at an outdoor art festival and there was very little art that I looked at and liked. And even when I saw art that I liked, I generally thought I could do it better. That will sound like arrogance, no doubt. There was one fellow who produced art like I would have wanted to and I thought his art was technically better than I could have accomplished. But it wasn’t nearly self-satisfaction that I felt. It was much more self-dissatisfaction. It wasn’t enough that I felt I could produce better art, or art at least as good. It was that these people had the tenacity, had the passion, and perhaps the studio space, and I didn’t. It’s not enough that I can do perhaps as well or better. It’s that I don’t. Perhaps I can, perhaps I could, perhaps I couldn’t, but so long as I didn’t, so long as I don’t, it doesn’t really matter. A genius that doesn’t speak is as useful as an idiot but more tormented. Not that I’m presenting myself as a mute genius.

I didn’t know that I intended to flagellate myself here. I have a few spare canvases. I have some oil paints around. And rather than continue to feel bad, I shall have my coffee tomorrow morning then set up my easel and canvas and my paints. And, just because it is there — as with, as far as I have been instructed, dead baseball legends — , I will paint. Yes. Yes I will. In which case I should have taken this photograph tomorrow when I could be more than a poser.

But then I might not have cajoled myself into actually painting. If a poser keeps his pose, when does he stop being a poser?

SS