My latest idea is to pack up all my belongings and move to the Berkshires in western Massachusets. There, I'll rent a little cottage in the woods, off the beaten track. I won't need much - just a small place, perhaps with a porch on the front for the fine evenings. Oh, and a cable modem of course. I'll pay the rent by doing the occasional odd job. And maybe by selling some of my paintings.

Oh yeah, I didn't mention that. I'd learn to paint, and I'd spend the summer months walking the backwoods, painting what I see.

Flight Dream

Well, it's a fantasy, ain't it? But just for a moment, yesterday morning, when it first came to me, I actually thought about it. And then I thought about all the bugs and mosquitos, and about bad winters, and about how even more impossible it would be to ever have a boyfriend :) And, I may be a bit of a loner, but I know that under that kind of isolation, I'd go stark raving bonkers.

The idea came to me yesterday, right after I'd parked my car downtown on my way to work. A fire-engine was passing, with its siren going in a banshee wail, and a motorbike revving its full-throated engine. I'd spent the morning trying to get my new handheld PDA to synchronize with my computer, and left home fuming at technology. All these gizmos - they're labelled personal productivity appliances, but they just seem to make life more complicated.

And I thought suddenly, how lovely it would be to have a simple life, away from all the stresses and noise of city life, just contemplating nature, and trying to figure out your own relationship to it. And a part of me has always wanted to be a painter. When I was a kid, I used to draw a lot, and I became quite good at making reproductions, in colored pencil, of illustrations in my "Big Book of British Birds."

As an adult, the urge to learn to paint comes out again every time I'm confronted with art, particularly when its art which has a direct relationship with nature. I know that, eventually, this urge will work its way to the top of my priorities. That will happen once I've got the other stuff, like film-making, either out of my system entirely, or integrated into my life. Maybe when I'm middle-aged, I'll take up painting, golf ... and country-and western dancing. :)

In the Park with Courbet

The direct trigger for all these thoughts was a series of emails from a grandmother named Meg. She'd somehow come across my website, and asked permission to use some of my photos as source material for her digital artworks. You've probably been wondering - did Keith do all these beautiful images on this page? Well, the answer is no, they're all by Meg.

As we exchanged emails, I learned a little about Meg. I was tickled by the fact that she was married, and a grandmother. When I first heard from her, I'd guessed that she was a young lesbian. And with black hair, for some reason. But here was this grandmother in her mid-fifties playing around with homoerotic images from my site! The other thing about Meg that fired my imagination is that she lives in the Adirondacks, a part of the North East I've travelled through several times, and love, for its natural beauty.