Greg Keeler is a professor of English at MSU, an accomplished poet and artist. The Following is from the preface of a novel I wrote this past summer called Painting Water.  Though it is my narrator, Clinton Stanford, speaking here, his experience with painting is much the same as mine.  Throughout the rest of the novel, our experiences depart considerably.  For example, he castrates himself in a bicycle accident when he’s nine.

“I had intended to be an artist ever since I was a child, but it wasn’t until I was in my early fifties that I bought a small set of acrylics with canvases and brushes, and, with no formal training and no instruction manual, created what I considered to be my first successful painting.  It was of a pool on the East Gallatin River near what is now my home in Bozeman, Montana.  I am not sure what prevented me from painting like this earlier in my life.  I had tried it only once before and had come away with an overwhelming sense of failure and futility.
I was fourteen and housebound with a case of viral pneumonia and had seen a photograph of brilliantly colored fish swimming among the branches and domes of a coral reef in the pages of a National Geographic, and I wanted desperately to reproduce the scene in dimensions and colors even deeper and more brilliant than those in the photograph.  Because I had done little but cough for two weeks, my mother was happy to oblige and bought me a beginner’s paint set.  I remember my immense feelings of hope and adventure as I read the manual that came with the set then squeezed my paints from their little tubes onto my pallet where I mixed them with linseed oil.  Within an hour, I had created a smelly, runny mess, with drips where coral should have been and a big brown blob where a grouper was supposed to be resting in its turquoise grotto.  In my impatience and despair, I took a rag and smeared the grouper into an oblong smudge.  When my mother came into my room to observe what progress I had made then inquired as to the nature of the smudge, I told her that it was a bomb, and that the title of the painting was, “The Bomb Floats Down.”
A friend saw my second painting, the one of the East Gallatin, and was as surprised as I was at the effects I created in my depiction of water and asked where I had acquired my style and technique.  I told her that I didn’t know for sure, but I ventured that it was from gazing at many varieties of water throughout my life.  She said she found it hard to believe that I could evoke such a representation just by looking at water, and I agreed.  I told her that perhaps it was a combination of the events of my life and the accompanying imagery that gave me the wherewithal to create such effects.  I also told her that it might have been the amphetamines in the form of Adderall that a psychiatrist had prescribed for what he termed a chronic and life-long case of attention deficit hypertension disorder.”