He used to have a desk. Well, a drafting table. Well, he still has it.
Month over month for about a year he kept adjusting it down and down until finally it was horizontal. There it stays. It’s not a desk anymore. It’s just an open-faced junk drawer. You can’t paint anything on it, unless you just want to cover the junk in color.
He built the table himself. He was very proud of it. The heavy, flat, wooden surface was perfect. Not now. He found it too linear. He found it too geometric. He found it too boxy.
Since then, he only ever paints outside. The park is his studio. The ground, his easel; sometimes, low branches in a tree; often, his lap. His jeans are a work of art in themselves these days.
The smalltime critics in this little city have enough experience to recognize the change in his paintings. It wouldn’t take much; anyone can see it. Those painted outside are becoming greater and profounder enigmas. Sure, nature has categories and patterns, but only in and through incomprehensible complexity and dense obscurity. You have to know what you’re looking for to find nature’s underlying systems. Otherwise, it’s all confusion and color.
He used to have topics and focuses and goals. He used to have lines and figures and order. He used to sit down at his drafting table and start and finish and submit his work to important galleries and important people. He used to know what he was painting.