Notes to Self

If anyone can be a travelwriter, then, can anyone be an artist? Or, can anyone learn another language?

In a word, yes. Anyone can be taught to draw or paint or to take great photos or to speak French. All of these things take time and effort to learn. All of these things require a really good teacher. But yes. Art can be taught. As well as French.

I’m of the school of thinking that anyone can learn anything. And that includes art, writing, and even languages. The trick is to find the right teacher and the right method. Not everyone learns a subject in exactly the same way as the person sitting next to them. For example, some people have no problem learning a language by sticking themselves into a conversation. I, on the other hand, learn best by discipline and memorization. I like looking at languages as a puzzle that I need to put together.

So really, if you want to be a writer, artist, photographer, or learn another language, but feel you haven’t got the talent, just keep looking for that right mentor or teacher. They are out there.

Most of my possessions have been in storage for seven years, including all of my old photographs. I used to shoot a lot of slides when I was traveling and using a 35mm film camera. A few weeks ago something possessed me to get my box of slides and my slide projector out of storage and take a walk down memory lane. To my horror, I found that my first trip to Europe, which was about six months long and included lengthy stays in France and Italy, had almost disappeared, given in to the vestiges of time and the life expectancy of slide film which was developed on the road.

So, as I was looking at that trip through very faded photographs, I took out my dSLR and started shooting photographs of the slides projected on the wall. They came out sort of dreamy, sort of like they were taken centuries ago rather than in my lifetime. Some are in worse shape than others. Most of the stuff I have at the moment is from Florence. But for some reason I thought they were usable and have used a number of them in the Tuscany section of the site. So if you happen to stumble on them and say ‘Egads, what’s that?’, well, now you’ll know.