Why The Long Face

This was me- moping, er, mopping my way through the past 2+ months of life. Deciding after 9 years in a 43 year old house in the ever growing climate of the tropics, that some sorely needed improvements were going to happen.

Multi-tsk-ing, oh, tasking, my way through being my own contractor and sourcing, buying, researching and ordering parts and pieces for bathroom renovations. Tsk-ing was more like it. What should have taken two weeks turned into almost 2 months with my studio serving as a staging arena for tiles, sink, plumbing parts, grout, concrete and lots of boxes.

We don’t have Home Depot ( but will in a few months ) so everything had to be purchased blind with hopes that it would all fit and look ok.

This is why I sacrificed painting:

Horrific

 

Terrific

Hard to imagine that a 5.5 X 7 foot room could be so involved- re-routing plumbing, and so many components to coordinate.

I missed you all- readers, artists, bloggers, brushes, tubes, canvas, turps, silence, ( hammer drills, you are irreplaceable but caused way too many Exdedrin to be ingested )

The daily frenzy of coordination and builders tramping through here made me wonder if I was Coming Or Going…………

Coming Or Going  8 X 10 Oil on Panel

 

And because I know you missed her too, and in case you were wondering if the chaos had any effect on her…. this ought to dispel your concerns…

 

Cloud

It’s good to be back.

Think I’ll brush my teeth again, and wash my face again, and comb my hair again……..

Missed September

Like some weekly magazines that only publish 46 issues a year, this was the month I obviously needed to skip. Something about this time ( we refer to it here as Sucktember ) with perpetual eyes on the weather map and two hurricanes behind us that dashed the opportunities to set up serious painting. A quick half hour oil study below:

It’s been a tri-fecta of family diversions ( elder mom complications ), endless clean-up after two major storms, and much as I hate to allow it in, the wing-nut lunacy of the political bazaar that has become so offensive to me, I can’t listen to or read about it anymore.

Watercolor doodles to prevent atrophy….

But I possess  the American Medical Associations’   FDA approved remedy for ennui which can only be found at the foot of my bed:

Cloud and Angel, clearly disregarding MSNBC, CNN and Time Magazine.

Three quarters of the menagerie showing humans how it should be done.

I shall now channel Cher in Moonstruck and demand of myself that I ” SNAP OUT OF IT !”

Back In The Saddle Again – Work In Progress

Moving towards painting without drawing first. Didn’t say how I was progressing in that arena, just hoping that someday I might befriend proportion and scale without drawing first. Until then……

Willow charcoal is loose, ethereal, rubs off if you exhale too close to the canvas. Good for keeping loose, so I purposely remove some line work as the paint goes down or else the dastardly pitfall of filling in can ruin the gesture.

So just as Stella was getting her dormant groove back, I had to leave this piece and be away for a week. I’m going to seriously try not to muck it up since painting on top of already dried paint sometimes leads me to that dreadful trap of adding too much, playing the game of chasing values and almost reproducing an entire second painting over the dried one underneath. I said I’d try.

Please hope I succeed.

Now THEY have succeeded in convincing me that after a week away, walking them would have more merit than watching me twist in the wind figuring this stuff out. ” Oh, just take us for a walk and forget about your whining”……….

You cannot ignore 4 eyes and 4 ears of this magnitude of cuteness and continue your mission.

I tried.

Really, I did.

Trying to ignore them.

I know when I’m done for.

Walking, it is.

I am a sap.

Where Did These Come From? When Did This Start?

Every site, every page, every paid advertisement on every search engine is suggesting another way to ” Lose that belly fat “,  ” 10 tips to a flatter belly “, ” Free, easy rules for a flatter belly”. Does anyone believe this? Like the birds on Hitchcocks’ telephone lines, these ads seem to pop up in one place or another and now that I’m bringing it to your attention, try to avoid seeing one.

And they’re about as free and easy as the Nigerian chain letters.

I actually think a little belly fat makes for a more inspired model to draw from: meet the goat man-

My favorite spot for a little belly fat, actually exists right here:

” I don’t care if your tummy IS a little round, I love you and want you to come out and play with me”

If those ad people want to strike a chord with a burgeoning market, they’d re-address their focus to the world of bloggers and painters who sit most of the day and re word the come-on to read:

” Follow this easy tip for a tiny butt “

Bet they’re reading this now………..

A Million Little Pieces

Painted not with brushes but with excised, tiny pieces of paper collected from magazines. Especially magazines of good quality stock so they’d withstand cuts with an X-acto blade, picking up with tweezers and finish with medium.

I kept folders  assorted by colors:  reds, blues, textures, anything that looked interesting. My favorite  locale for harvesting tear sheets was the waiting rooms of dentists or Park Avenue doctors. Ritzy publications,  heavy stock, great color saturation. Cough, loudly, tear simultaneously and seize that perfect page.

Started with a rough sketch for composition and then went to work laying on pieces of paper.

Unfortunate addendum: not a method you can deploy under the rotor blades of a ceiling fan or your million tiny pieces will be confetti.

Some images from the St. Croix Ag Fair 2010- great local food, thousands of people, acres to wander, animals on display, and enterprise in all forms.

Best view in the house.

St. Croix is snake-less, except for this 7’9″  illegal escapee who was rescued and is now a teaching tool.

Kids and kids.

Clouds’ ancestor?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch………

These two……

Don’t you see a branding of calendars, napkins, mugs?

What Do We Call This Year?

So we popped corks, watched a ball drop on TV, watched Dick Clark need a chair, heard the fireworks, listened to the conch shell be blown….(it’s a  Caribbean tradition and a sketch being started ), and made the usual hasty boo boos in writing the first checks of the new year.

But we still don’t know what to call it or how to welcome the decade. For the past nine years it’s  been two thousand one, two thousand two,  two thousand nine and now?

Now what is it? Twenty-oh ten? Twenty ten? Two thousand and ten? Two thousand ten? It’s unchartered is what it is. We’ve no precedent for how to say it so maybe it will sort itself out or maybe it will go the way time telling has gone. Pre- digital watch wearers told you the time as ” twenty to two “. Now ask anyone wearing a digital watch what time it is and you’ll be told ” one forty “.  Or if you’re in the company of a military person, you might have to take out your abacus and calculate that oh sixteen thirty means you missed your plane.

Or as Carol has mused over, we could still be using Roman Numerals.

Or just say what my elder friend says with a look of fed up disgust when told that something needing fixing will ” take time “.  ” Crap “, she says, ” I don’t have time for time “.

Well anyway you say it, the new year has trotted in and schlepped along with it, a new decade.

Let’s agree that no matter how we say it, read it, or write it, we’ll all do our part to improve some small acreage of this planet we live on.

Because from her head to her crazy toes, Cloud is making the world a much prettier and sweeter place. Let’s follow her lead.

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