Angelina

I am having fun with this pretty girl. She may be done. I'll look at her in a few days and decide. I like the wishy-washy paint.

Poppy

 

Can you tell,  the garden is blooming. Art and life do tangle, don't they? To experience one is to be reminded of the other. 

 

Georgia O'Keeffe, Red Poppy, 1927, O'Keeffe Museum

O'Keeffe, so cannibalized by consumerism that she borders on the cliche. But I can't look at a red poppy without seeing hers.

Edinburgh

1. I will probably be banned from Scotland for this.

2. This is my version of "don't ask, don't tell" - don't  ask what the hell I am doing at this point, because I sure can't tell.

3. I am saving a boat load of money on canvasses, since I just keep painting over the same one.

Spring Flowers

The acid-green (is that chartreuse?), the pink, the deep indigo blue...hmmm hmm to be able to capture it all in paint.

 

Edouard Manet, White Peony Branches and Secateurs, 1864, Musee d'Orsay

Not the best photograph of the work, but I love the way he captured those fleshy globes of flower.

Thinking more about Manet- while not a huge fan of Impressionists in general (though how can anyone be totally cold to their charms, except maybe to Renoir, who brings out an ick response in me) I have always loved Manet. There's an astringency there that cuts through the gloppiness that seems to mire most Impressionists. Manet , Cezanne- now there's a bracing whiff of turpentine, enough to chase any sentiment from the room. 

Ah, if I didn't have a life, I'd go paint.

Hills

I have rediscovered cobalt blue.

Lucid Sympathy

 Charles-François Daubigny (French, 1817–1878), On the Banks of the Oise, 1864, Metropolitan Museum of Art

"...They'd stood together in the Metropolitan Museum looking at a small picture by Daubigny, a painting of a village along a river's edge at dusk seen from across the water, light and peacefulness so miraculously captured it produced in her elation. ...(he) took her hand and said that from whatever he read or studied, all  he wanted was the power to describe how a human being could arrive at the lucid sympathy this man must have felt for what he saw. A lucid sympathy."

This passage is from Union Atlantic, by Adam Haslett. "A lucid sympathy". I have been thinking about the phrase for days. Lucid sympathy for the natural and emotional world expressed through art is shamelessly out of style, isn't it?

I don't particularly like this style of French painting (I mistrust the seductive ease of it, which I suspect says more about me than it) and I don't even know if this is the painting the author is referring to. But the lucid sympathy  of Daubigny? Yeah, I get it.

 I like this book. A young author of absurd accomplishment. Gorgeous phrasing and  use of language, keen observations and passages that capture the lucid sympathy he must feel towards the world, despite evertyhing. I find myself reading phrases over and over just for the sheer joy of them. (His observation that education has moved "from enlightenment to the grooming of pets" is priceless.)

Angelina

Oil on Canvas.Am having fun scraping and scratching through the paint.

Edinburgh

.

Maybe I can live with a tighter, more neutral color range. I mixed a stand oil/ turp "juice" that I am using liberally.

Hills

Still plowing away.

Edinburgh

The inevitable scrape down. Sigh. One of those relationships you just know will end badly.

David Park

My Mothers' Day gift to me. Written by his daughter; there is something heartbreakingly odd (as a parent) reading a (now adult) child's perspective on standing in her painter father's studio. Well, there is something heartbreakingly odd about being a parent, being a painter and being an adult in general, I suppose.

I'd forgotten how much I liked David Park and I am happy to be reminded.

More things I've learned

If you actually clean your brushes after you use them, instead of letting them steep in turpentine for weeks at a time, they last longer.

Hills

Oil on canvas, 18 x 24 ish. Just the groundwork. This is a canvas that I have painted over many times, so when I started this I had a black ground, which is new for me. I liked bringing light out of that deep dark (usually, if I backwash at all, it is with whatever murky color I have left from the last painting. Tsk, tsk, I know)