Miscellaneous

Sunday Evening

Thanks to all of you who commented on "Rainbow Over the Gap" and also to those of you who sent best wishes to David.  He was very surprised and delighted with this gift.  We moved it down to a small, portable easel on the piano where he can enjoy it as he walks through the living room. 

My teacher thinks it's really almost there, but she want to help me try to remove that annoying ridge of dried paint so I can have a smooth surface.  It scares me a bit, and I have to admit some reluctance to work any more on it.  I confess I'm a bit tired of that rainbow!

Which brings me to my main point of this entry.  It seems to me that I spend a lot of time describing in possibly tedious detail the minutiae of my painting activities.  This is because, as with a quilt, every facet becomes supremely important.  Being new at this kind of painting is like being new at quilting, trying to get one's points right, and obsessing over it.  It doesn't make for very interesting reading for others who may not share the interest and who don't give a hoot about making a rainbow look atmospheric rather than solid or cutting off the points of triangles. 

This blog is becoming quite helpful to me in that writing about my ideas, my experiments, my frustrations, and my modest successes clarifies each step, what I've learned, and what I should do.  It has become a record of my journey to many exotic locations (okay, more often than not the journey arrives at a dead end and a u-turn is needed).  So this is terrific for me, but maybe not so for you. 

I can't promise to write less about painting, but I can promise to write about things other than just that topic.

So here's a discovery.  Tulips, as I think we all know, sometimes have glorious interiors, but have you ever looked at the underside of the outer flower?  It's not quite the "here there be dragons" of uncharted seas, but there are the occasional idyllic shores.  Who would have expected that collar of pristine white under the tulip?