What's the diff?

I fiddled with this bowl, some of the shadows and the background, adding more yellow to it, darkening the shadows and trying to make this bowl FEEL more like BOWL. I think this one should just go into the files of "good try, Sistah," and spend some time in "time out" so that I can reuse the canvas some day. I do love the idea that a pencil sketch of Jack playing the cello is beneath the paint; that alone makes the piece meaningful - at least to me and maybe some day to him.

Once upon a time...

When I first moved into my wonderful purple picket fenced, magical, spiritual space, I painted this on a board, using fabric, acrylic and God only knows what else. A dear friend loved the piece and asked me if she could have it to hang in her living room; I was flattered to bits and just recently asked if she could send me a photo of it. Now I yearn to see it close up, but just looking at it brings back to me the feelings of joyful possibility that I had when I moved here. I must remember those feelings so that I can hold them close when circumstances conspire against them, and glee seems to have fled.

End of nasturtiums and bad bowls...

Sometimes I wonder if my brain is lopsided. When I see things like this bowl, I wonder where my eyeballs were as I was painting this funky acrylic on canvas, a canvas that I had used to sketch a picture of Jack playing the cello when he was much younger. If you look closely, you can still see remnants of the penciled face in the top part of the painting. I like the way the inside of the bowl ooks and the inside of the plate, but the rest is ready for the trash. Sad to end my painting days in such a skewed fashion, but such is life.

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.