Episode 4 · 15 min
I once spent two hours on a warm pier on the Big Island trying to paint a single fishing boat, and somewhere in the second hour I realized I had never actually looked at a boat before in my life. I'd seen thousands. I could draw you the idea of one with my eyes closed. But I'd never looked — not the way the paper made me, where every guess I made was wrong until I stopped guessing and started seeing, and the one blue I'd carried my whole life fell apart into a hundred passing colors that only existed at ten in the morning, for about eight minutes, in that particular light.
Episode 3 · 14 min
I got home from a trip last spring and within four days I made the best painting I'd made in almost a year — not because I'd gotten better in eleven days, but because something had passed through me on the way home and left it there. It wasn't a painting of anywhere exotic. It was the light through my own front window on a chipped white bowl with two limes in it, a bowl I'd walked past every day for two years and never once seen.
Episode 2 · 16 min
The first time I felt like I was actually in Hawaii, I was lost — turned around on a back road on the east side, no signal, the road suddenly running through somebody's real life, with trucks in the yards and a small white church and old men in plastic chairs outside a store. I'd been to the islands twice before that and I don't think I'd really been there at all. I'd seen the postcard. I'd never seen the island.
