Up to now I have never made any real connection between my writing and my painting, my watercolors. My dad gave me my first set of watercolors when I was just eleven years old, in 1943, the most harrowing year of the War for my family. There is a connection between the paintings and writing which I have only recently figured out. It is important. I do not write about anything unless it connects to a place – a real place, one where I have been or lived and lived to the point that it set its imprint on who and what I am. Just as I cannot write about people without at least some grasp of how their language works. And the working of the language are important. I am the second of Four generations of writers on language, a reality that up to now I dismissed as irrelevant. I began painting again, and for real, about forty-five years ago. So these paintings are ikons of that imprint on me. So I think they can serve as good a visual introductions to what I write about as any I can come up with.