Yestarday i found some old pictures of myself, and I felt curiously detached from (and maybe intimidated by) the teenage girl looking out at me. Just as if she was saying: what have you done with your life? Maybe if I met that girl, my younger me, would I like her as a person? Respect her? Being honest, have I lived up to her expectations, fulfilled the promise of making something out of her artistic talent, remained true to her ideals and dreams? It’s not that it has passed too long since those pics took place, but maybe and somehow, months can seem to be several years.

I guess that for her (or for me), responding was not easy. The young girl in the picture was a demanding and highly-idealistic individual whose closest friend; was Salvador Dali , and whose idea of heaven was to stay up all night drawing and writing to the music of Lacrimosa and Sibelius. How could I explain to this intense young perfectionist girl that while her perception of art may have been good, her understanding of life and human reality was not?

Or was I only making excuses? Trying to develop a potentially painful confrontation by insisting that the unforeseen complications I had encountered during my lifetime were really beyond my control?

Perhaps, but I rather doubt it. I am also (and still) a human being, and I need to blame someone and make up excuses to feel better with myself.

And besides, I felt rather good about myself. True enough, I might have had some difficulty explaining to my young girl-friend why I stopped making art to become an art critic (just like everyone, I’ve become a hypocritical critic), and why I did a few other things along the way she would have hated. However, I could look at her straight into the eye and tell her that while things may not have turned out quite as she had expected, I had, nevertheless, remained essentially the same.

For that and several other reasons —most particularly its power to challenge me to remain true to my ideas and dreams— I've decided to create this space to fill it with pictures that reflect my life experiences.

>> Written back in 2006. Now, in 2011, it still makes sense to me, so I'm keeping it.