"It's both something new and beautiful," said Fahim, 40, offering the painters free bottles of juice.
An author, as a painter, is free to choose a self-portrait style that may be representational or, in the case of, say Picasso, abstract or some combination thereof.
According to James Reidel, in "Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees" (2003), Kees the painter "felt freer than he did as a poet".
And because the photographers were supposedly documenting the landscape as it was, the painters were free to depict it with a certain amount of imagination: Bierstadt's canvases were ideal and theatrical - he had found, he said, a 'Garden of Eden', and critics wrote of his paintings that they were not so much landscapes as a form of portraiture.
Like the Ming painter Shitao, whose free brush Fu especially revered, Fu believed that liquor stirred the creative juices.
Noel Lanzas is a full-time concierge at the Ritz-Carlton South Beach and a Surrealist painter in his free time.
"If you have been stressing and annoyed by the old, dirty paint in your home, call the painter today and free up that negative mental energy for some positive thoughts and activity," said Johnson.
But his inner artist may be an abstract painter yearning to be free.
I remember the last time I did take Ecstasy, a few weeks after graduation, a fellow house painter gave me a free hit.
One of his more interesting late works is A Thing of Beauty (1956), a study of a gifted young painter who must break free of middle-class conventions to realize his potential.
