Thanks for votes of confidence, but nobody needs to like my stuff. I usually don't, much.

Here are my excuses. I did try as best I can to answer the question of what to me is art. I can't tell if it all sounds like art gobbledygook, which I try to avoid, but as a somewhat frustrated artist, I've thought about it a lot, while I wasn't making much of anything.

Excuses continued. I have contractors at my house without warning, these days. Five electricians today. While I'm trying to paint a short-notice commission for a wedding next week. Then we had the elementary school talent show tonight, where I led my kids' band. My boy played an electric bass I built out of a shovel. You have to stay to the end at these things, kids are performing, bravely.

So I'm getting on here lately to wind down and talk, and not up to finding some pictures, scanning them, remembering how to do anything. I'd like to find a photo of an old thing that I felt pretty good about, because I think I can explain what it is that seemed pretty good, for me.

There's a local magazine called Today's Woman which keeps mentioning me in an odd way. First in an interview with an interior designer who bought some things, and he said a painting of mine is his favorite thing he owns. It's very nice of him. But then the writer explains that it's a painting of me and my family, nude. Um, no, and it sounds odd. I met the writer once, and told her no, it's not a painting of us naked, it's something I made up, but now I see she's written about it again, the same way.

    Well, I think I'll paint a 6 foot picture of us and the kids naked. Or, maybe not. It's funny but I don't think I've ever seen any interview or event that was written up by a journalist that didn't have some odd nutty notion thrown into it out of thin air.

   This is a nice thread, and it would be fun to see it stay aloft awhile.