A reader recently remarked with stunned disbelief and delight on Matt’s wild impromptu technique for painting a canvas:  throwing paint onto the ceiling and letting it drip down onto the surface of the picture plane.

Matt responds:

Thank you for your wonderful comment.

Over the years, I finally came to a conclusion that the boxes we put ourselves in really do not exist.  We create them in our own heads when we wonder what “they” will think.

When you take “they” out of your creation, you’re only left with me, myself, and I.  What the hell am I going to do, and what am I trying to say?

There’s a great story about the Rockefellers, when they had all the money in the world and built Rockefeller Center in New York.  When the building was done, as the story goes, one of the Rockefeller brothers went over and said to his brother, “Isn’t it great?  Won’t they be impressed?”

And the brother said, “Who are we trying to impress?  People are supposed to impress us!!!”

So if we do thing to impress others at the detriment of our own sensitivities, I believe we are shortchanging ourselves.  Once we build boxes, we’re building them bigger and bigger, and suddenly we’re not in one box, we’re in 10 boxes.  And maybe when we finally sober up, we realize we’ve built ourselves a little jail, and we get up every day wondering, “How can I make them feel happy?”

Then you get into:  Let’s make hula hops or listen to the same song on our IPod or send text messages...  We become part of a mindless crowd that rushes like waves onto the shore and then goes back out and then comes back in.  Then when you see the fish coming in, you say, “Oh, the hell with it, I like it better out here!”

I believe that’s the situation about boxes and really discovering yourself.  The book A View from the Center of the Universe states that within each of us are billions of years of knowledge, and all we have to do is try hard to pull out the nuggets that we didn’t know were there.

The accomplishment is the discovery of something new that matters, which is an accomplishment that has nothing to do with what “they” think.  To me, that discovery is the driving force of life.

Matt