I have sat hesitantly in this chair, a supposed master yet apprentice before this computer.  Making the decision to show up is eighty percent of the matter, as Woody Allen says.  But I wonder how to step through the vault of this daunting image file; an overwhelming expanse 5000 pixels wide, and 7000 more in depth, reaching past the visibility of my screen’s self-contained 17 inches.  The possibilities are intimidating, yet it eagerly beckons me, challenging my creativity to show it all I have.

This digital drawing tablet is a smooth, technological surface of receptors.  Its design is purely to translate the ever perpetuating canvas of my mind into languages that microchips can understand and spread back before me, in an outward, tangible reflection of my inner world.  It seems like an ideal relationship, but that relationship remains barren.  And so I wonder, where does the ribbon snag between my dreams and the screen before me?  What makes it so painful to venture that first stroke?

There are hidden depths, rich pools that lie between the billow and surge of my mental landscape.  They crowd and overflow with a secret color that is unceasingly impatient to be loosed upward.  These images are embryonic, straining for the chance to thrive and transfer.  They would revel in the shape and vibrancy contained by something as simple as the file “Untitled.psp.”  But the path from these hatcheries of vision, down through the veins coursing in my arms, and into the muscles of each of the fingers of my painter’s hand,…that path is a very hazy one.

I sit here pondering the path of expression, but I have not expressed.  I have not moved.  The screen is still, and the tablet untouched.  If making the decision to show up is eighty percent of the matter, then what of the other twenty percent?  Perhaps it is the knowledge that I have a verdant imagination, five capable fingers, and one pen and tablet to make it all a reality.  Nothing more is required, except that I step past hesitation.

Oh, I can feel it now.  When I give in and let go, the strokes will be fluid and light.  They will curve and twist in firm and bold touch.  They will be freed with time, after the streams of mind have eroded and smoothed away every resistance along the surface of my fears.  They will be transformed.  Bleeding and rushing.  Applied rich or running with spidery fingers.  Living and open, falling over the virtual texture of vast parchment that waits, blanched white and bare.  Every pixel will sigh within the wash,
as if they have been holding their breath the whole time, like I have been holding mine.

I have a verdant imagination, five fluent fingers, and one pen.  My heart descends upon that knowledge.  With deep breath I examine my upturned palms.  Then, right hand reaches forward, grips the pen, and settles.  It presses against the active surface, and moves.