I am an artist. If I paint a specific mountain with acrylic paint on a canvas, you may feel free to do the same. Your interpretation of that mountain will not be mine. If I paint a stretch of beach with water color and you want to paint that same stretch of beach with watercolor, it will not offend me nor cause me to be threatened by your painting hanging next to my painting. I am an artist. You cannot copy me anymore than I can copy you. It would be like trying to copy the way the clouds are placed in the sky. Your brush will not paint with my hand moving it. Your spirit will not move with the same vibration or intention that my spirit moves. My spirit moves my hand that moves the brush. Our work is not comparable. It is neither better nor worse. It will be different.  If we are potters and we both make bowls of the exact same batch of clay they will be different. And if I decide that I want to make a bowl just like the last one that I made, I cannot. It will be different. I am an artist. I am not a machine.

    Art is like that. If I work with wire, stones, and glass of all kinds, it is my work. I don’t know how it will turn out. It is a new creation.  The spirit that moves the hand that forms the wire around the stones moves differently through me than it does through you. Art is like that. So, you may always feel free to paint my same mountain. It will never be a copy. We are artists. We are not machines to duplicate. I truly don’t know of any artists that would care to duplicate anything of any other artist.

    I am inspired by many artists that do every kind of work imaginable. To be an inspiration is a fine purpose for any artist to attain. To inspire imagination and creativity is a fine gift. We should not hate or distain the ones that we inspire nor should we be threatened by them. We should always lift them up and push them forward to create even greater things than we have ever seen. To do anything less is missing one of the best parts of being who that we were created to be. That is what art is like.