I can’t help but notice–I have a problem.

If you scroll through my camera roll, you’ll find hundreds of photos of the same small building — a pump house on my neighbor’s property. Golden hour. Snow. Daisies. Fog. Flat light in the middle of the day. I can’t stop photographing it, even though this sucker looks like something Andrew Wyeth would paint.

I should also mention — and I’ve kept this quiet — I’ve always had a thing for Andrew Wyeth.

Ta-da! True confessions of an abstract painter.

It was never the sentimentality people project onto him that got me. It was his attention. The way a dried stalk of grass carries full existential weight. The way his plain houses just sit there, not performing anything. I photograph winter dead grasses too. Bare trees against empty fields. I think of him every time, and I don’t apologize for it anymore.

When I moved to a hillside above the Strait of Juan de Fuca, I fell in love with my neighbor’s pump house.

It’s a tiny building. Yellow siding, dark shingles, sitting in a grass field doing its job while completely undermining my identity as an abstract painter. Right now the field is full of daisies. In January it was surrounded by snow. In golden hour the yellow siding goes warm, the shadow it throws goes long, and the grass bends in the wind off the Strait.

I have photographed all of this. Many, many times.

The muse has been on to this since approximately day one. She is not what you’d call patient.

“Paint the damn pump house.”

“I’m an abstract painter.”

“I know what you are. Paint it anyway.”

“It’s a utility structure.”

“Oh for the love of — Wyeth painted a woman crawling through a field for twenty years and you’re going to get precious about a utility structure?”

“That’s completely different.”

“How.”

“…It just is.”

“PAINT. THE PUMP HOUSE.”

She’s been right about these things before. Annoyingly, consistently, insufferably right. Shadows on the ceiling. Rothkos in the mud. She was there for all of it, usually at volume, occasionally with profanity. So I stopped arguing and started paying attention to what the pump house was actually doing to me.

Which is the same thing Wyeth’s work has always done, quietly, when I thought no one was looking. It’s the thereness of it. The way it sits in complete possession of itself and doesn’t explain why. That quality of a thing being absolutely, irreducibly itself. His plain houses don’t perform. They don’t apologize. They just stand in a field and dare you to look away.

I can’t look away. I’ve established this.

And when I finally admitted that to myself, something clicked. That quality — a thing in complete possession of itself — is exactly what I’m after in my own work, just from the opposite direction. Wyeth got there through precision, accumulating detail until the subject becomes fully itself. I get there by taking things apart, dissolving everything until what’s left is color and light and maybe the ghost of a shape. But we’re heading for the same place.

When I look at the pump house I’m not thinking about rendering the siding or getting the roofline right. What I feel is stillness. A kind of solitary dignity that catches me in the chest before I’ve had time to be smart about it. The yellow in flat light is lonely in the best possible way. In golden hour it’s something else entirely — almost defiant, glowing against that enormous Pacific sky while the Strait goes silver behind the trees. A small thing holding its own against a big landscape.

I’m going to paint this someday, when the studio is ready and I have the space. I don’t know what the painting looks like yet. I just know what it feels like, and that’s enough to start.

This week’s creative prompt:

Something caught your eye. Don’t describe what it was. Describe what it did to you. Then do something with that.

Thanks for noticing with me. Until next week–

Hey, if your muse has ever ambushed you with an unlikely subject, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.