Am working on a 68″ x 24″ painting of a totem and a woman from Calgary comes and stops in her tracks and says’ “I love it”. I show her the painting of the other totem that I have done and she says, “It doesn’t speak to me.” So I tell her that I will send her a picture of the totem that she likes when it is done. “I thought it was finished”, she says. I look at it. There is an image of 2 vases underneath the newly applied gesso that attempted to obliterate a past effort. There are bands of sterling-silver leaf and the partly-painted totem speaks of fragments. Now I see what she sees and I can’t paint further.