So I spent a good half hour in front of a Dickinson painting this evening. I had seen that it was on display when I was at the gallery with a bunch of students some weeks ago and finally managed to get to really see it tonight. The passing people thought it was strange that someone would stay with a painting for so long. For me it is as if the artist is wrapping himself around me and we are having this deliciously intimate conversation. I can feel him in the manner by which things are done on the canvas. The painting and I dance about when I am so completely engrossed in it. It is hard to explain on a verbal level and I am only stabbing about at it here. So was it really black Dickinson or rather a prussian blue mixed in? I could see it where the sleeve of the dark cloak hit the edge of the hand and a slight lightening happened where the colors unintentionally mixed. Blue indeed, blue where I had thought only umbers and blacks, like liquid walnut. A nice surprise and I began to look elsewhere for it. I loved his willingness to have a wiped off nose, as if it would not ever be right so just the liberty of smearing it out. No nose for you lady. I wondered was it a lack of attention, or the need to not create the hyper detail that was the face of the centered man. Oh, and what pure genius that was, how when I sketched it I could sense how his strokes and the line of this aged face was falling downward. So the line itself within the form and the building of the form held the message aging in its very execution. A liberty of arm that had me convinced that it was effortless. Why was her foot with that sharp heel dangling precariously over that beautiful blue and white pot. How her innocence had a sharp fox like edge, along with her attenuated face and almost unformed hands. I had a time I tell you a time. People like to watch people sketch and interrupt reverie with silly statements. It is a communion I am having and rather private, because if I gave all this reflection to a passerby they would probably fall over. Ah, here I am because I am practically bursting with it.