The Mekong River - Don Khong, 2006 - Art as Voice

If, as Christopher Hitchens claims, the main issue for a writer (and a speaker) is finding your own voice, what does that suggest for budding painters or just plain old people who try to "articulate" with lines and colors instead of words.  I won't say instead of language, because lines and colors are a language and the voice they express is equally significant as that of words, but people who paint and draw often perfect their craft by practicing drawn renderings that mimic the visual world around them; I don't believe this helps locate an artist's voice.  My paintings are too often wiggly, wobbly and overly colorful, but with the kind of vision I have and the lopsided seeing I do, perhaps this IS my aesthetic voice.  I have enough crappy paintings that take me back to the precise place I sat and mused and mulled to know that the voice of visual art is just as powerful and just as expressive as the verbal.  Here I was sitting in a small bed and breakfast on a little island in the Mekong River in 2006 on Don Khong after spending time ogling the Khone Falls, that expanse of rapids and rough water that interfered with the French explorers' trip up the river in 1866 or thereabouts.  When I crossed the "ferry" to this little island, the ferry being a little souped-up canoe with a motor, I found the most serene, tranquil spot on the river, a place where I could rent a motorcycle and ride around the rice paddies, wave to women bearing bundles and wearing those wonderfully pointed straw hats that looked like straw coffee filters on their heads.  I felt as though I could touch the clouds and clearly that was what I as trying to portray in this little watercolor...

This was my view at a little spot where I ate dinner; who could possibly "articulate" those gentle pink clouds reflected in the wrinkles of the water?  Not I certainly, but how I love to try.