Ever so slowly, I am learning what not to paint if I wish to retain my sanity.  My friend, Cindy, has been trained to remind me  ("Don't ever paint another violin") after the vicissitudes of the last one.  And you know how I feel about painting ducks from behind.  

Now would someone please learn to repeat back to me:  "Don't ever paint another bunch of boats!" (Or is it "ships"?) I have just spent over five hours working on about half of what you see here.  It's amazing how complicated something like this is when you really have to stop and look at it.  

I've learned the hard way that it's a lot easier to paint something if you have intimate knowledge of  all of its parts.  And I am a prairie child.  So what do I know from boats???  So your second task, Oh Gentle Reader, is to let me know if something's wrong with her.  Be specific.  Draw diagrams.  Go down to the harbour, Toby and Lynne.  And you, Sandra, reconnoiter East Coast harbours.  Come visit me with a paintbrush.   

Waiting to hear.

Yesterday's riff on floor colours was incomplete:  I failed to specify the exact colour of your mid-tone wall-to-wall carpeting.  This exercise is best completed "in just-spring/ when the world is mud-luscious," as e e cummings put it.   Even better if you have a low-slung dog.

Simply wait until a substantial amount of local mud has been donated to the floor.  Important:  wait for it to dry.  Then get out your palette and carefully match the colour.  At my house, the tone would combine burnt umber with some titanium white.  In Oakville with its red earth, however, burnt sienna would be the "earth colour" (get it?) of choice.  You Winnipegers are intimately familiar with the colour "Gumbo."  Paint a swatch and march to the carpet store, congratulating yourself on yet one more hour per week wrested back from the cleaning abyss. 

(Please note that there is no accompanying painting for this post.  It turns out that I don't do floors.) 

You're welcome.

As I washed the kitchen floor today (turns out that it's beige), I reflected on what I would do differently the next time.  As Jon frequently reminds me, I should never have been allowed to choose flooring.  I pretty well always get it wrong.

So here's what I know now, and what painting taught me.  There are times where you want high contrast -- a high value white against a low value dark, or vice versa.  You even save that high contrast for the focal point of your painting;  every painter has heard the phrase:  "Save your darkest dark and your whitest white for the place you want the viewer's eye to go."  In a portrait, that place is often the pupil and the reflected light.

Now what I did wrong in both the kitchen here and the cottage bathroom was to choose a light floor.  A pristine canvas, so to speak, for any spot, spider or smooshed blueberry.  Today the kitchen floor looked so much like an abstract painting that I really had no choice but to get down and clean it.  But the minute it was clean, it turned right back into an empty canvas, daring life to slap paint on it.  Double-dog-daring it.

Smart people put down mid-tone floors that have a variety of related tones.   If I were to be allowed to choose another floor I would do that.  Hope you're reading this, dear.

It's official.  I have it.  A bad case of it.  The infection started Wednesday and has gotten steadily worse.  I have a classic case of Painter's Frenzy.

I am in Hour Thirty of this bout, perhaps the worst I've ever had.  All normal pleasures are gone.  There's not much to eat in the house.  I have trouble sleeping because of it.  Whole days go by unnoticed.  I never leave this room.  I was in my pyjamas yesterday at 5:45.  P.M.

However, given the extent of the illness (twelve square feet), I predict that my health will be restored in about twenty hours spread over the next few days.  Aside from severely aching shoulders and flat feet, I will be fine again.

I do know who infected me:  Stephen Ninaber is a superb Ontario photographer who roams Earth looking for beauty (google him), and it is he who posted the gorgeous photo that lowered my immunity; he then clinched the infection by encouraging me to go ahead and paint the image.  Clearly a carrier.

More than one artist friend has commented on what a great winter it's been to get some real work done.  Our group, for example, lost three or four days due to the weather and almost everybody buckled down and simply painted at home.  "When life gives you snow days, paint snowstorms"  or something like that.

The weather was absolutely perfect yesterday and I had planned the usual runaround until I discovered that the car was dead.  That's really what prompted that large painting I talked about yesterday.   Just toning twelve square feet took some contortions on the basement floor.  Still feeling intimidated by the complex subject matter, I felt that the task of gridding the canvas and roughing in the proportions in chalk would be more than enough for a day.  Funny, though -- it's like starting to pull on a loose thread.  Before you know it, the whole sweater's in play.  Or, as Sherlock would say,"  "The Game is On!!"

That  was around 10 in the morning.  Once I figured out how to manoeuvre it on the easel, one line led to another and I was in a full-blown oil grisaille before I knew it.   By dinnertime there was no dinner but only a shirt with bits of burnt umber and white on it.  And this.

As I mentioned earlier, my studio is the size of a pea.  In fact, the easel is wedged between a skinny set of drawers and my computer desk.  It's manageable, and I love the space, which has stone walls and tons of light.  I often slide a painting along, back and forth behind the computer and the drawers as I work.  Seeing the "whole picture" is a challenge.

Now one of the major decisions before starting a new work is deciding what size it should be.  Portraits usually find their dimensions fairly easily:  the portrait of Leslie Ashworth was determined by the pose I chose:  the focus needed to be shared between the centuries-old Odoardi violin and Leslie's brilliant musicality, for they are spiritually one when she plays.   As Yeats said, "Who can tell the dancer from the dance?"  A mid-size horizontal painting recommended itself.

Landscape is a different matter.  It needs to be big enough to capture the sense of space.  Until now, the biggest canvases I've worked have comprised about eight square feet.  But this morning I toned a 4 foot by 3 foot canvas for a seascape I have in mind and hauled it into the studio.  Occasionally these fits of madness come upon me.

Gosh it's big.  That's well and good if you paint fast and in acrylic.  Not so great for a slow glaze oil realist.  Right now it's on its side as I painfully do the rendering in chalk.  I may have to bring the stepladder in.  Hope to finish sometime in this decade.  I'll keep you posted.