Ocean Song

I am much like a migratory bird returning to this part of the ocean every fall. Drawn by the sound of the surf pounding, the smell of eucalyptus and sea breeze. I am also on pilgrimage to a place that resonates with wonder and unpredictability. I came to realize this as I slipped over the peak of Mt. Tamalpais and saw the ocean before me. This part of the California Coast holds every tear I have cried, every prayer I have uttered and every question I have carried for the past three decades of my life.
I take my questions for a walk along the dancing surf and elusive horizon. They accompany me, imprinting upon my soul like my footsteps in the sand. If asked, 'What is it you DO as an artist? I would answer, "I take my questions for a walk on the ocean every morning as the sky is turning light. Then I paint."

I am thinking alot these days about Nietzsche's call for a musicality (as embodied in the Greek term musike) in reading and thought of philosophy and his works. How does this thread into my work as an artist, as a painter? Art and truth formed an indissoluble unit for the ancient Greeks.

Babette Babich, in her book, WORDS IN BLOOD, LIKE FLOWERS states that this sense of musicality "corresponds to the entire cultural scope..." and the "modern tendency to reduce music to the 'organized' art of sound obscures the equiprimordial sense in which MUSIKE could be regarded, as Nietzsche saw it, as the enabling element of intellectual or spiritual as well as aesthetic and physical education and in which MUSIKE figures as the determining force of both individual and societal character -ethos-."

What is the enabling element of intellectual and spiritual and aesthetic and physical integration for me as a painter. What is the ethos of my work?