While in Venice, both visual and poetic inspiration seems to possess me and as I stood on the platform waiting for a vaporetto steamer boat to bring me to the adjoining Island of The Lido, I looked at the fronds of seaweed clinging to the floating platforms and imagined they were mermaids’ skirts and had to rush home and write down this poem and sketch this picture to paint it later in my studio back home.  Venice is inspirational like that, and I learned never to go there without a camera, a notebook and a pen and some crayons and pencils to document all my ideas and inspiration and study photographs and sketches