There’s a story told of a farmer who lost use of a bit of his field to an enormous boulder, far too large to move or excavate. Only the rounded top protruded. He simply plowed around it year after year.

Farmers have that tendency to be earthy-practical. Their attitudes impress me and in many cases I think I emulate their core practicality.

I’ve been thinking about the big challenges and how they’re met and conquered or negotiated.

At work, I watched how a businessman devised the harvest of untapped potential in the source of our revenue stream. He looked for procedural improvements that would diminish costs. He dreamed up ways to encourage employees to coax dollars into the net which would surely be lost otherwise.

“Practical” isn’t confined to the farm, that’s for sure.

In my paintings, I’ve sometimes come across what seemed insurmountable obstacles that kept me from matching the original vision to the resources at hand to express it.

I’ve not found that one fool proof solution, unless one counts this formula: keep moving, keep thinking, keep feeling.

Any one of these elements can make the difference.

In the case of the farmer, fate served him a lesson when his tractor bumped the boulder and to his astonishment, it moved. Turns out it wasn’t the tip of a monolith but was only a thin plate in the shape of a shallow mound. He drug it to the side and never had to plow around it again.

In art,  if all else fails, I just wait for the inspiration cycle to return. But first I hire a model, or research, or in the case of a complex composition I simply start.

Then the little bump against my obstacle comes, it’s true nature is revealed, and it’s easy to remove.