Though I have only been watercolor painting for seven years, I bring a lot of creative experience to the easel, so to speak. I studied poetry writing as an undergraduate at Vassar College and at various prestigious poetry workshops. I have also been doing black and white street photography since 1986 and find there are many parallels to creating poetry. Good poetry often uses a line or image that has a relation to another line, word, or image in the poem. Similarly, good photographs can have textures, tones, shapes, and images that relate or correspond to each other. The iconic photographs of the late Henri Cartier-Bresson are brimming with these correspondences, such as people wearing similar hats or the handwriting on an old wall echoing the script on a passerby's shopping bag. The fun and challenging thing about street photography is finding and capturing these "relations" or "echoes" in a split second Ð not an easy thing to accomplish in a complicated city with lots of moving targets! Street photography is an act of instant visual editing.

I started to paint because my wife Lenora and I spend a lot of time in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. Lenora and I drive up from Brooklyn with our daughter Isabel every weekend in the summer and about once a month otherwise. We love New York, but the Berkshires have added a whole other dimension to our lives. We do things there that we could never do in New York. In addition to hiking and cross country skiing, we also attend outdoor concerts and plays. Lenora does yoga, makes pots and presses flowers. I always loved being there but felt the need for a creative outlet. I didn't want to photograph there because my photography is an urban experience. Black and white street photography possesses a rich, urban tradition in much the same way jazz does. As much as I admire some landscape photography, I have absolutely no desire to do it. It is too technical for my talent and taste, and it requires big, expensive cameras to do the genre justice. For me, photography is about immediacy and energy. I love prowling the streets and "hunting" for photographs.

In the spring of 1999, Lenora and I were vacationing in Mendocino, California. Mendocino is a beautiful little town on top of cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. One glorious morning, I looked out the window of our bed and breakfast and saw a group of people sitting on the lawn with easels in front of them. They were all painting our beautiful white inn in that unique California light. I felt compelled to go out and watch. It was a watercolor class being taught by the famous Charles Reid. These students had come from all over the country to be in this class. I watched them paint and thought, "This looks hard, but going to a tranquil Northern California town to paint in watercolor?! I can get into this!"

The next time we were in the Berkshires I started asking around about watercolor painting classes in the area. I got a few names, one of which was Pat Hogan (www.pathogan.com). Thank God I found Pat! I often wonder how my style would have turned out if I had chosen a more realistic, precise, "photographic" painter. I think that first teacher is pretty important. Pat encouraged the loose style that I now employ; she was a great, patient, encouraging teacher. I have actually only had a handful of sessions with her, but they were enough to teach me the very basics and how to appreciate good watercolor on a deeper level. Pat's passion for the medium is contagious. It makes you want to go out there and paint, paint, paint! She is a stunning painter herself. I believe a good teacher for a beginner in any artistic pursuit is someone who knows how to find the good in what you are doing, to help you not fear failure and to convey his or her love of the medium.

When I am photographing on the streets I have to act very, very quickly. I have to trust my instinct, experience and reflexes. In these very quick moments, I often see "blocks of shapes" or a "fleeting impression." The detail is not a factor for me. This is very similar to the way I approach painting. I try to get the composition down on the paper with the broad strokes of the shapes, the major light and dark areas, and in the case of my painting only, the color.

In street photography, there is always a possibility of some sort of failure. In photography, if my timing is off or if I shook the camera too much, I've lost my opportunity forever. I think that seasoning in failure prepared me as a painter. I don't fear failure; I will always take a chance. It is true that mistakes are harder to correct with watercolor than, say, oils, but a painting can indeed be "saved." I like that! Since I work with film (and not digital) I don't see the results of my labors until I get around to developing and finally printing the film. I won't know if something worked or not until later. In painting, the results are immediate. In painting, my subjects are not walking away from me. No one is walking in front of my subject. A tree is not going to curse me out for painting it. And in painting, a world of color has opened up for me. This has probably contributed to my sometimes going overboard with color, but I'm okay with that. I would rather be bold than not push myself to any limits at all.

For me, what street photography and watercolor painting have the most in common is a vibrancy, a jazziness, an immediacy that I find addictive. Both are spontaneous and liberating and both can have beautiful "accidents," particularly if one is painting fast and loose and watery. I love the unpredictable element in both because it artistically can take you places that you never expected to visit. While photography is engaged with and engaged by the everyday life of a metropolis, it too can be very solitary. Painting is quiet, solitary endeavor.

In photography, I always keep things simple. I don't use fancy cameras or papers or films and developers. I am the same with painting. I own a lot of brushes but I mostly use only three. I use Windsor and Newton paints and try not to use more than six colors in a painting. I can't get enough French Ultramarine, Burnt Sienna, Sap Green, Permanent Rose, Raw Sienna and Windsor Yellow. I don't know a lot about color wheels and what colors complement each other. I go with my gut on these decisions. While I like the idea of plein air painting and me out in a field like Van Gogh, I don't do it that often. So I work from composite snapshot photographs that I take of favorite places and, more and more, from my head.

One of these days, I will take my daughter painting with me. I have this fantasy of us standing by a summer stream, with our easels side by side.

Visit Matt's website www.mattbialer.com