Tuesday Evening
Clarification #1: if you thought you'd never have to read about my painting again, I'm sorry but that's not what I meant. Painting is something I love and about which I want to learn more. Writing is one of the best ways of sorting through one's ideas and feelings in order to come to some realizations. So:
Looks like the case of the vanishing rainbow, doesn't it. Okay, here's the story. First I'm going to go back to the day I showed the various stages of painting the rainbow for Clarification #2. The very first picture, the one that looked as though I flew over the lake scene in an bi-plane and dropped a huge plastic banner with a child's representation of a rainbow on it? Remember? Big bold stripes of red, yellow, blue, and purple? Several people commiserated with me on that failed attempt. I didn't fail at the painting, I failed at the explaining. That dreadfulness was the necessary first step in the rainbow-painting techniques I used. I was merely recording the steps (not for posterity but so I'd remember them!).
Clarification #3: I talked about the ridge line without explaining what I meant. It was like a flashing red light to me, and I thought you'd immediately see what I was talking about. On either side of the rainbow, there was a raised ridge of dried paint.that acted like a fence corralling the rainbow or a channel holding a rainbow-stream in place so it can't escape or flow into the rest of the sky. Very disconcerting to me. What was that canal doing in the middle of my sky? I couldn't get rid of it no matter what I did. My teacher Sharon, when she commented on the "No-Noel-it's-not-finished" painting, told me she'd help me with that. I won't go through all the gory, scary details except to say that it involved an Exacto knife and maybe 10 - 15 minutes of patient scraping on Sharon's part (I was almost too scared to watch!). Once that was all done, my Erie Canal was not only not visible, it was also absent in the tactile sense. Hurray!
Now I have laid the ground work for the next in the series of rainbows. This time it will be done "properly" and will, I most sincerely hope, be the final and most glorious of all the aforesaid trial runs.
Let's just hope that David doesn't sink to his knees when he sees what I've done to his painting!
Be brave! Even if it doesn't come out the way you want it to, think of all you have learned in the process.
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