A Painter’s Forest

And how the painter’s life changed

Ricky felt as though he was adrift at sea being bandied about by the waves. He felt like he was a boat with no motor and no sail completely at the mercy of the sea.

All his life he did the opposite of what everyone told him to do. He defied social convention and most rules. Consequently he had few friends and he had been disowned by his family. And girlfriends never stayed around him for long.

Loneliness was something Ricky never experienced. He could not even fathom what it was like. He did not need others to bring meaning to his life. He was mostly happy and content… except for the feeling of being adrift.

Ricky was a starving artist who painted the odd things he saw around him. His paintings were crude and not in keeping with everything he had learned in art school. Even when he was a child with crayons he purposely colored outside of the lines. And he always put the wrong color on things. The sky would be purple and the grass blue and the house would be orange.

Occasionally one of his paintings would sell but never for very much. Usually it was just enough to buy more art supplies. To pay the rent he drifted from job to job. He immediately grew bored with each one and quite often he ended up being fired.

Once, after moving to a new town, Ricky went for a walk in the countryside. The land was covered with crops growing in straight lines. And the crops grown were all the same crops; acre after acre of them. It was all so straight and uniform that he became nauseous. He quickly moved to yet another new town.

Only the main road through this small new town was paved. All the other streets were dirt roads and none of them were straight. They followed the contours of the undulating land. The houses in this town were all built at odd angles to the streets and to other houses. And they were all painted different colors and they were all different shapes. Not a single house was square and there was not a single straight line in this odd town.

Ricky found a room to rent and moved in. One day he felt the urge to paint a landscape so he gathered his easel and a canvas and some paints and brushes and went for a walk down a dirt road that led out of town into the wilderness. Eventually the dirt road turned into a narrow foot path and he found himself walking into a lush forest.

He kept walking and soon began to notice some very strange trees. The trunks of these trees were purple and the leaves were black. He saw bushes that were blue and flowers that were brown. Then he saw some orange birds and some squirrels that were lavender-colored. He sat down on a large red rock to take it all in.

He sat on that rock for hours marveling at this bizarre forest. Not once did he set up his easel and start painting, in fact from that day forward he never painted another picture for the rest of his life. There was no longer any need or reason to paint. It was almost like Ricky had stepped into one of his own paintings.

And to his great joy he no longer felt adrift.

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