Painting Projects

After I finished the floor in the upstairs hall, I decided to continue the pattern on the chest of drawers. Without any planning, I taped off some squares and started in. Well, true to form, I didn't think ahead and painted the corners of each drawer some indeterminate size. After they were done, I realized I had done it in such a way that the pattern would not work as a checkerboard. Also, when I removed the masking tape, a lot of the original paint flaked off. I might as well have eyeballed the squares, as I did on the floor. Attempts to use tools like that to make things perfect always end up badly for me.

Once I saw what a problem I now have, I abandoned the project temporarily. The open can of paint still sits on the top of the bureau........I wonder for how long.

Yesterday at Wednesday art group I began this painting from another of Toni's pictures of Chile. I mapped it out with acrylic and then finished it today with oil. I like it, though I'm not sure it wasn't better before. Sydney and Lisa insisted yesterday that I leave it alone. The roughness of it was so much like the paintings of other artists who stop once they have a suggestion of the subject. Other things besides the image then become center stage and even an untrained eye is forced to look at patterns and colors and textures and composition, even if they don't know it (or even like it, for that matter). I love that kind of work, but somehow I can't do it. I have to torture brush marks until they look like a picture of what they represent more than what they are (marks). I am getting better, though, and managed to let this one remain somewhat unmolested. The two aspects of the brush marks are both evident, with a little too big a nod toward disguising themselves.

Well, better luck next time.

First Tulips

I took this picture a few days ago, and now several more tulips have blossomed. The garden is embracing its second year with great enthusiasm.

New Pastel

My new issue of American Art Review arrived a few days ago and as I looked at the paintings I was inspired to take a look around me for material. Many of the paintings I liked in the magazine were simple landscapes quite reminiscent of my own surroundings. So I took my camera down the street to Dog Island and took several pictures. This is the first one, just past the Biss' house, a pastel done on blue- painted watercolor paper. I finally feel like I can move on from my Epping Road series.

I guess that means I have recovered from losing Alice.

Version 2

I worked on this watercolor with pastel, which I think improved it considerably. I also made a card for Thelma by painting the same picture smaller. She is still at the hospital as far as I know, though she may have been transferred back to the rehab center. She is being shoved back and forth as she improves and deteriorates. No one knows how it will end, but I wanted to tell her how much I love her and how much she means to me. I wrote it all down honestly and sent the card off two days ago. Betty Lou is visiting her often and has been keeping me posted on her condition. "We three are one," she told me, and it is true. What great times we had together..........a strange and wonderful threesome with our easels and paints. We wandered around, looking for places to paint, eating in restaurants, sleeping in motel rooms. At the end of each day we studied each others work and discussed what we liked and didn't like. We talked about art as if it were the most important thing in the world, superseding everything else. And it was, and is, transcendent, rising above everything else. We shared this thought, and were united in it. We cast off the other aspects of our lives apart and we did live as one. We are so lucky...........