"I got permission to paint like a child again last fall in the halls of the  Croatian Museum of Naive Art in Zagrab.

Naive artists don't have to play by the rules. Masterpieces by Josef Generalic and Ivan Rabuzin, hanging on those Croatian museum walls, told me that genius doesn't need formal training. In their themes exploring the joy of life, forgotten nature, lost childhood, and wonder at the world, the rules of perspective, form, color, and composition were thrown out the window. To them, a cloud-filled sky was a playground, a bare winter tree-a fractal. The work had echoes of dark age artists like Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch. The scenes of common life, the only world they knew, glowed like icons painted by a third-grader with 30 years of experience.

I wanted to run home  and begin painting. I realized that, as an artist, I already looked at my Pacific Northwest world like Generalic saw Croatia. Here we have 4th of July celebrations at Freedom Park, a zip-line experience, New Year's Eve parties at Jack Archibald's, a Friday  farmer's market, a near-by fly-in, a crazy rubber duck race down the Stilly, a soap box derby, a bicycle hill climb, and openings at Karla Matzke's Gallery.

I could see these paintings in my head as I left the museum, and cemented them by compiling a list of the cool things that identify the Stanwood/Camano Island area as a community.

In the meantime, I learned the language of their paintbrush and the new-found freedom of painting with innocence, again."