what you aren’t

…I was talking to an old painter one day,

about how he came to paint his canvases. He said that he never knew what the completed picture would look like, but he could usually  see one quadrant. So he’d make a stab at capturing what he saw on the canvas of his mind and when it turned out not to be even remotely what he’d imagined, he’d paint over it with white. And each time he figured out what the painting wasn’t, he was one step closer to finding out what it was.”

Anne Lamott, “O”, Nov. 2009