Dressing it up

I started with a white mug and a white bowl and the black coffee maker. What makes these objects so evocatively intimate to me? The promise of hot coffee and cereal with bananas is enough to delight me. Can an image capture a promise as enticing as morning rituals? I could only imagine doing it by dressing it up with my nasturtiums and another blossom from my butterfly bush. How DOES one paint something white? I think I've got to fix up this bowl; it really has problems, but I was really happy with the coffee maker, a fancy one that Lisa bought me when she could stand no longer the grunge of my old one - one that had become so familiar I couldn't see beyond its morning promise!

Domestic partners

I found this long, thin piece of wood in the neighbor's dumpster, but it didn't hold paint very well; maybe it was the subject OR the painter. All in all this is not my happiest moment. I am thinking that domestic objects become beautiful when put with flowers. Just look at them: the grimy tea kettle, the fundamental iron, the running shoes (okay, they get the hell out of the domestic realm). My nasturtiums are going wild, the only bit of color on a shady stone wall with leaves and bushes behind it, so the brilliant bouncy orange highlights that corner and reminds me that I must pick so they proliferate. Pick I do, and then because it is all so fleeting, I feel I must do those orange bounties justice by painting them and letting them linger a little longer in this world. Come see them.

Fixing it up...

The computer or camera must make paintings look glorious - even my primitive, rough work on boards seem to look pretty fetching! I don't really like the brush strokes on the blue here, but it does suggest the fall of the edge of a table that isn't there. I always love putting things into pictures that aren't really there despite Max's telling me that it doesn't look like it really IS. Who knows what things really are anyway? How does anybody know anything for certain? Which is more real, what we experience in a book or a movie or what we experience in everyday life? Both change us and make our lives dense and complex. It is the same way with color and line. "What if " seems to be the governing principal of any effort to capture and embrace what is in our world. What if I moved this line? What it I used this color? What if I poke my finger in my eyeball? Or gum up my nose? What if I could hold the whole world in my arms?

The fleeting nature of hisbiscus

Because I cannot seem to load this on Facebook - who cares anyway?- I will come back to my old haunt of Patches, a place where I can reflect on creative work in process. This is a quick painting I sketched out when I got home from the movies with Katie Palmer. It's on a board about 3 feet by 5 feet, and I was trying to capture a vibrant, yellow hibiscus that Lisa had given me when I returned from Nepal. It is blooming like a champ, so I set up this little "scene" and gave it a whirl. I shall work on it tomorrow night and try to fix the kettle's distortions, the background color and the flowers. I just love looking at the work after I've gone into the center of it and returned, still sane but somehow spent.

Dizzy-making

I am beginning to get dizzy with all these patterns, but maybe I'm just getting sick. The Greek Key and the Arrow design strips are in the middle. The Greek Key uses way too much fabric and is too labor intensive to be pleasurable for me. I liked better the arrow, but I'm getting really tired of these fabrics and think I'm ready to be done with the quilt - at least ready to put pieces together. Some of these strips are just too short and will have to be joined to other pieces, so it may turn out to be a hodge-podge, which is no big deal for me. I will see in class on Monday whether there are any more really great patterns to learn, and if not, I'm ready to make some nifty connections between these strips and make the thing all come together.

Stop already!

This will be my last strip of this checkered type; thank goodness we have another class tomorrow night because I've got enough strips to pull together a complete quilt, but I don't want to stop. See what tomorrow will bring with new tricks and techniques.

Oonie loves this flowery red fabric, so I must save some of it for her quilt; I like that they will both share a fabric as they do a DNA...

Keeping it going with Zigzags...

I'm loving making these strips for a Seminole Strip Quilt, and working in these larger patters is gratifying because I can get a strip done without too much fussing around. I showed these strips to my son Jack because I was excited about how his quilt was coming along. He took one look and said, "It looks the same as it did before," so I'm thinking the aesthetics are going to be utterly missed on him. As with most things, I must do it for the sheer pleasure of process, of DOING it. The goal, the end, is never a reason for spending time on something. Even playing long tones on the cello has to be a process that pleases me or I won't do it. I'd rather play Bach's Cello Suites, stumbling around in my music making, that practicing the way a real musician needs to do; I suppose that's why I am such an amateur at most things I do.
The dog beckons...