#1271 Night watch. Mixed media on solid pine panel, 14×24″. $250.
This is the last of the current batch of cloud-shaped paintings Theoretically the shape is great for a kids room, but not necessarily the poem written in it, if you want your child to ever sleep:
Night Watch
Stars between clouds
a night to stay up and watch
until the sun rises.
One of the things that didn’t get on camera when I was taking photos of my Paint-the-night class was that earlier in the afternoon Rick (Rick Archer, President of Moreno Valley Cultural Arts Foundation and Vanguard Gallery) and I had hung up a 14-painting solo show on the left wall.
<Sigh> this is by far the first time that I have put up a solo show and promptly forgotten to take any photos of it. Senior moment!
Blissfully I was passing not far from the gallery on Monday morning and (seeing as I’m on the advisory committee and one of the tutors and I have a key to the gallery) stopped in to rectify this. The show will be up through August and there will be a reception on August 19th, 7-8pm. Rick should have the labels up by then! Actually many of these are available through my Etsy store at the moment (though it might take a little longer than promised to ship….).
Underpainting going down
On Friday I ran the Paint-the-night event at the Vanguard Gallery in Moreno Valley – and had 11 students, many of whom knew each other, so they were enjoying the evening together. We painted a scene from an open road through fields in the Ojai area – a painting I’d completed in watercolor many years ago and thought would work well as a paint night subject.
Filling in the grassland.
One of the thing that I tell students at these evenings, is that their painting is not going to look exactly like mine – which is why art forgers are paid so much.
Fences going in.
However this group all got really close to the painting we were working from! The main difference was that I had yellow ochre deep – vs yellow ochre which I usually work with, and as I hadn’t used this before, I hadn’t realized how dull this color is compared to regular ochre. I figure I learn something in every class too, so this was it for this one!
Most of the graduates. One had to go home because her baby was crying.
Sometimes it gets quiet at art fairs. There is often a bit of a lull around lunch time. If I’m sitting at the back of the booth at the desk, I’ll often use the time to work on my bucket list item of more Shakesperean sonnets than Shakespeare. Flagstaff was productive and I was able to write a sonnet each of the three days. I sometimes have to search around for inspiration, Saturday’s inspiration was the nest of sparrows within tweeting distance.
Sparrows
The sparrow has more color than you’d think
(but painters know burnt umber, wine, ecru)
and though they seem to flit off in a wink
the observer sees the little things they do.
Sometimes they’ll dust in patches of soft sand
and often in a puddle from the rain
with wriggling bodies, wings aflutter, and
the knowledge that they’ll soon feel fresh again.
The well-trained ear can spot each different call –
the black-throat’s glockenspiel and house’s cheep
the white-crowned sparrow’s sweet melodious trill
and common to them all, the young chick’s tweet.
So if you ever thought sparrows were plain
Take another look and listen, think again!
Was it a dead end, or just a curve in the road?????
I thought This was a very interesting article about Vincent van Gogh – one of my favorite painters. Maybe he was who we thought he was, maybe not! Ah, now there’s something we can’t do these days – trade places with our twin, start afresh, stand at the crossroads and decide to disappear around the bend. At least not in the technologically linked world – too much verification of ID. Not quite sure if I’d want to be anyone else anyway….
I’m still working on that bucket list of writing more Shakespearean sonnets than ‘The Bard’ himself, and sometimes a quieter hour at an art fair can be productive. Will had the opportunity to write about sparrow, but didn’t, though I don’t think he would ever have seen some of those mentioned, they just weren’t available there!
(but painters know burnt umber, wine, ecru)
and though they seem to flit off in a wink
the observer sees the little things they do.
Sometimes they’ll dust in patches of soft sand
and often in a puddle from the rain
with wriggling bodies, wings aflutter, and
the knowledge that they’ll soon feel fresh again.
The well-trained ear can spot each different call –
the black-throat’s glockenspiel and house’s cheep
the white-crowned sparrow’s sweet melodious trill
and common to them all, the young chick’s tweet.
So if you ever thought sparrows were plain,
Take another look and listen, think again!
My other half is, like me, clumsy. We buy glasses etc at Goodwill because then we never get upset when, inevitably, they are broken. I like it that we are both clumsy because neither can give the other a hard time about it. The other day I saw that one of his newer polo shirts had been used during a bleaching phase in the laundry and had two huge and several smaller bleached areas. OK, so I should’ve taken a before pic but you can figure out which were the accidental areas as he leaned against the washer then took off the shirt and let the front accident soak through to the back. I figured at this point there was nothing to lose from making a piece of art from it.
