May 24: Darkness came too soon, but, back home I worked up a few little paintings of things I'd seen...a little Kansas house; a thunderhead fading into the night...

This trip is giving me a good opportunity to exercise my craft, but much more is going on than that. The painting itself may not be evolving in any obvious way, but something interesting is happening at each stop: I'm creating an audience and also, at times, an optimal relation to the audience...with their help, of course.


May 25: Nothing here is quite what I'd expected, but after the expectations are discarded, it turns out to be just as good in its own way -- and more so because it's real.

This afternoon I was walking in the sun on a dirt and gravel road. Mallows. Yellow clover. Fields... I suddenly realized, for the first time since starting out from Rochester: I'm really here. I'm on this trip, and I'm out here in the middle of nowhere. It's hard to explain why this realization brought such profound joy.