A friend of mine once said that painting is all about about the color of the light meeting the color of the surface.

I really never understood it before I stepped out my back door the other day. The sun was low here in Santa Monica, and it struck the walls of several buildings behind my building. Some of the walls were ochre brown, others were white. But the colors were alive in a way I’d never seen before because of the color of the late afternoon light, each of them new in a way that could never exist if the sunlight and the color of the paint were not meeting in that unique way at that unique moment.

I went for a walk, looking at the trees, the sky, the buildings up and down Ocean Park Blvd., all of them fresh in that moment.

It’s a lesson for me, I think. To stay alert to what something is at this moment. The color of a building is never the color of the building. It’s the color of the building meeting the color of the sunlight at that moment.