Artisode; 4.2; Laurence Sisson

Give me a little beat. When I get to this age in my 80s, I still have that desire, that passion, to express something that has never been painted before. I found this way that I could paint tide pools and I could throw paint at the canvas and do it in a controlled way. So it was like controlled chaos. I did a painting at one time which I was totally exasperated with and I lit, I mean I have a temper.

I took out a brush filled with paint and I threw it at the canvas, at the panel. And now I had remorse because I had screwed up a perfectly good vaning because of one passage. So I started to wipe it off, I tried to brush it off and when I brushed it off I got this incredible three dimensional quality from this area. As a young kid when I had chicken pox, my parents put me in a quarantine and those days we had to go in a room for a couple of weeks literally, stay away from the rest of the kids. They gave me a little easel and a little pad and some paints and they basically shut me off from the world for that period of time and apparently when I got out of quarantine they thought I was going to be a great artist.

They just came out and said, well, Lonnie, that's beautiful work, you got to keep drawing and painting. So I did. When my parents had friends come in, they would all come over and just say this is fantastic work. I got so much encouragement that I almost felt I must be going to be an artist, that's all of us to it. He's painting a visual emotion, you look at him and you just have to, you can't walk on by, you have to stop and look, how did he do that? They are, I mean, you see around here, they're all bright, vibrant, lots, lots of clouds, lots of blue, lots of colors and... I was determined I was going to be a painter, I enrolled at the Worcester Museum School which was a wonderful small school and at that point I knew I'd have to go on the army so I enlisted when I was 17 but they sent us to Japan. I traveled all over Japan and I wound up eventually playing piano, enjoyed it all the time, played a piano at night, during the day I was able to go into the small towns and I traded

five tobacco for Hiroshigi prints and focal size and Uttamaro's and I just fell in love with the art of Japan. And that stayed with me, I just loved the images and the kind of angular quality and the rhythmic are a best quality of some of the print makers. I went back to Japan 40 years later and I got a glimpse of Fuji and there it was, the most majestic, single thing I'd ever seen. Something about Fuji is so magnificent and so spiritual even if you're not a Buddhist or a Hindu. When I really had something I wanted to say, if I had a spiritual awakening that I wanted to paint, something in nature that was a fantastic passage of forest and snow or some beautiful wave breaking off of Burnt Island or a great sky that I saw.

If I saw something like that, I wanted to have enough skill so that immediately I could pick up a brush and paint it in five, less than five minutes and I developed a language that I could use to express my feelings about the ocean, my feelings about me. I had a show once called Maine, The Moon and me because it was all about the moon and about Maine and it was about my feelings about the ocean and how the moon affects the tides. Right at the top of the edge of the moon and the sea, everything else flows up to that point in the painting theoretically. But I just loved the movement of the ocean, I loved trying to paint, serve. I kind of captured my imagination because I had seen work by Thomas founders and I began

to find images that I would never see in Maine, although I thought when I came out here I was going to go nuts because there wouldn't be any pebbles, there wouldn't be any rocks, there wouldn't be any shale, there wouldn't be any of the beach-gurry that I miss so much in Maine. Yet the very first time I went up to the Nambay Falls and the base of the Falls, here were all my rocks again, all the pebbles, all the rocks, all the things, plus Indian shards and wonderful little pieces of Adobe and chips off of the Redstone and the Chintley Rock and I mean it just was marvelous, then I realized why not, the sea came through here long before anybody thought of the civilization that would be coming, so the landscape, the desert was the floor of the sea, and out here the islands became the maces and the ocean

became the desert floor, but there was certain elements of Maine seascapes that were becoming the underlying architecture of my desert, so it became a perfect symbiosis really. Someone asked me the other day, what's on your bucket list? The only thing on my bucket list relative to painting that I would like to do, and that is I would love, it's impossible, but I'd love to hire a warehouse and get every painting it, every done, and put it in that warehouse, it'd have to be awfully big, so I could once in my life see what the hell it is I painted. I think that's enough for now.