Doing it.

Trapped inside by the rain and dark clouds you pace like a wild jungle animal or at least with the pent up energy of a second-grader. Will it never end? This eternal dark cloud which has settled over the coast and taken all of the color and light.

Sure, but why wait, in fact if you really are an artists you should be out there looking for what gifts the storm clouds have brought. See, art isn't something that materializes out of the ether like one of the spooks in a teen horror flick, although it can certainly seem like one when you wait with an empty canvas and find nothing at all to fill it with. But you can't let that stop you. Art takes work.

Yes, this is a discipline you have to work at every day. Just let a day pass and not only have you lost the time, (which you will never get back), but you have lost the unique opportunity to SEE.

Yes, like the joke in the old Holmes spoof, Without a Clue, you see but you don't observe. Cause if you really SEE, there is art all around you. The play of light and shadow as it races through any house turns ordinary things into wondrous treasures and you get it for free, if you SEE.

Look there, the cats have lined up like statues in a museum. What about that bowl of fruit on the table? Is that a Masai shield of a distorted reflection? It's there, if you want to SEE.

SEEing is part of what makes a person an artist. An artist sees what other folks just walk by. It's not a gift but a skill honed by hours of watching the things which fascinate you change and shimmer like a heat wave on a deserted street. But you have to SEE.

Take that pile of junk out by the shed. Is it a pile of junk or is it the next great creation in your magic show on canvas? We have so much more to SEE than the good folks who live inland, they don't get the gifts of the sea, washed up twice a day. They don't have birds of every sort and color wheeling on the air currents as they hunt for food, or the ships and boats, sailing or just rotting in the surf. How many people get to see a trawler fresh from emptying its load pass under a drawbridge with it's amber lights painting the ebb tide?

And then there's rust. Yes, rust, of course you have to SEE to see the art rust makes of metal parts forgotten by the folks who once needed them, cared for them, maintained them. The barnacles on the bottoms of the boats in the shipyard make their own art, but are you willing to SEE.

Art and artists have more in common with the Witch Doctors and Medicine Men of our tribal days, they see what we pass over and through magic of their own read secrets in the signs left by all the elements. But it takes practice, and it takes SEEing. How do you see, practice, practice, practice.

Art for all of its mystery and glory is a trade, like plumbing and carpentry, you learn by doing and as you do you get better and develop skills and find ways to make the tools you have do the work you SEE.

So get busy seeing and find something the clouds have left behind. There's no such thing as plumber's block and you should be just as good a tradesman as any plumber.