This is my wish for you: an uncanny encounter with a speck of paint...or perhaps a tiny blob of toothpaste in the sink... a fur ball deposited overnight on the kitchen floor...something you would normally wash away without a second thought, something that by all usual thought needs to be made gone... a pure bit of nothingness... as in -
Mr. Finster... a 60-year-old minister (and bicycle repairman)...was painting a bicycle when a bit of white paint on his finger, he said, transformed itself into a face and directed him to paint sacred art. He understood that voice to be the voice of God. He argued with the voice, he told interviewers, saying that painting art was for professionals.
The voice asked him how he knew he couldn’t be an artist if he had never tried.
And that in this encounter, you'll have the presence of mind to Be In The Now, as in -
That’s when Mr. Finster took a dollar bill out of his pocket and started to copy Washington’s head. He never looked back.
And, by god, run with it -
He set a goal of creating 5,000 pieces of art but completed nearly 48,000 before he died, famously signing each with the time — to the minute — he finished the piece, along with the date, the work’s number and his name.
It's a swell story, worth reading the whole way through.
And pause to reflect on the perfection of this, too: It's the genuine art pilgrim (1278.8 round trip miles per weekend), not today's preacher, who is most effective at reclaiming and restoring what is nearly lost.