This painting is of a bridge on my favorite lake in the world, West Lake in Hangzhou, China. Four feet by two and a half feet. I was inspired by a photograph one of my best friends from high school had taken, when he came to visit me in China. It was a rainy, muggy summer day. The lake was gray and colorless in the haze of clouds and mist. The willows on either side of the bridge, drooping and heavy. Somewhere between the lake and the sky is the horizon, but you can not find it, all muddled in the damp and rain. Even the paint communicates this wetness. If you were to touch it, you would feel the dried rivulets where the paint ran down the canvas to become the image of bent willow trees reaching their boughs to the water. The only definite thing is the bridge, stark and black and solid in silhouette against the pale gray lake and indefinite, ephemeral gray sky. At one time I had considered adding a single figure to the bridge. Some person standing alone and apart with a red umbrella. But I loved the painting as it was, stark and simple, sad and elegant. I knew I would fall in love with the shocking, brilliant red amidst a wash of gray, but not yet, maybe not ever. Maybe that is what I like about this painting, it feels indefinite, unfinished and precarious, like life. Well like life feels like to me, right now, at least