Learning is a strange process. When you first approach a subject all the details seem to blend together into a incomprehensible jumble. Keeping things straight in your mind requires a concerted effort. Sometimes it seems like its just impossible. This is probably why I've avoided most structured approaches to learning things. But, since one has to do something to pass the time, I have kept painting and painting and painting, with some drawing here and there. And even though I don't know any fancy terms to describe what it is that I do, my mind has still figured out a way to categorize the actions involved in painting. Without any sort of input really, it has created a sort of intuition to what happens when certain paints are applied in a certain way. Before starting this picture, I had gotten kind of fed up with my usual approach to making these paintings. Despite yielding mostly different images, the process and technique I used was much the same from painting to painting. Namely, it was a completely undisciplined disregard for all but the simplest properties of the paint itself, its color. Sort of like a brute force smearing of paint until it approached a somewhat recognizable or suitably complex form and then giving up for fear that any further efforts at improvement would just muddy the final product. But in order to create stimulating effects, to get closer to providing some sort of simulacrum of reality on the canvas, even with completely imaginary subjects, it is necessary to keep in mind other properties of the paint. For example, its possible to apply paint in transparent layers, and some paint is apparently actually transparent and conducive to this. When these layers are built up, textures on objects begin to appear much more multidimensional, as they are no longer just one color, but a combination of colors from the light reflecting off all the built up transparent layers. See, its complicated. Yet, strangely enough my random poking around through the years has readied my mind to think in this more complicated manner. Admittedly it still requires quite a bit of effort to restrain myself from falling back on old habits, but it is somewhat comforting to know I am capable of creating slightly more advanced images now.