If artists and writers are honest however, we will tell you that often we have no idea what we are doing. Most of us rely on a combination of skills, experience and sheer determination to realize a painting or piece of writing. We experiment. We tinker. We “see what happens”. Photographer Sally Mann calls hers a “magpie aesthetic,” scavenging whatever happens to be around to capture with her camera.

I am currently entertaining a family of woodpeckers that regularly visit my terrace. I've always been a regular bird watcher and avid fan, and I’m lucky that my living space affords me a prime viewing spot where I try to accommodate the locals with appropriate plants, plus sugar and seed nosh.

To paraphrase poet Mary Oliver's oft-quoted question, what art do I plan to make with the last part of my wild and precious life?

What's in a color? Quite a lot. It is one of the only categories I can think of that has interest on so many levels: each color has its own history of invention or discovery, there is a psychology of color, there is a science of color, there is a language around color, there is a racial and political aspect of color, color is universal as well as personal,

Before I grew into a wanna-be-hippie teen who clashed with his conservative values, I remember my father and me as “pals”. We have similar tastes and temperament and everyone said I looked the most like him of his four children. He doted on me and over the years we shared a secret or two: teenage transgressions with boys and drinking on my side, the same, with middle-aged women on his.

By high school, my friends and I would pile in some boy’s van on the weekends for concerts at the Spectrum or the more intimate Tower Theatre in Philadelphia where I grew up, regularly waiting in line for hours to get front row seats and lose part of our hearing. These were the days of Bic lighters glowing in a weed-infused haze, asking for Just. One. More. Please!