I don’t know about you but my life is littered with unfinished projects — books with bookmarks stalled in the first hundred pages and paintings which never made it out of the gestation period.  People who move a lot probably have such things under better control but long tenure gives rise to a wide variety of hidey-holes for tucking away this and that.

But the recent spate of organization around here has coughed up both thises and thats  -  sometimes lacking only a wire  or a simple frame.  With these prodigal children finally returned to the inventory, I am sincerely surprised by how predictable I am.  Dimly aware that I love owls, I am nevertheless surprised to find five paintings titled "Wise".  So too do I not only watch squirrels daily, but apparently paint them quite regularly.  You already know about my affinity for irises and pears and morning glories and waterlilies, not to mention males engaged in fishing and little girls in tulle but it seems I am also apparently attracted to houses perched on hills.  So too, great old trees, long views from high above,  summer river studies of blue water, and autumn landscape tapestries.  If I were to go to the trouble of identifying all of the series, more than a dozen would report in.

And therein lies my problem as an artist.  Instead of dedicating a year to painting variations of similar subject matter in the same style, I behave like a dog running through a meadow — doing sharp turns to follow scent trails.  At best, my body of work is a crazy quilt.

Though my method remains quite consistent (agreeing to ignore last week’s post), when it comes to subject matter I am a slut.

Jon thinks I should take myself firmly in hand and focus on portraiture.  And, he added, he is also just plain tired of being my favourite sitter.  So consider this a shout-out for volunteers.  I will feed you tea and crackers.  Please help.  It’s either you or Theodore,  and Skye terriers all look alike so there’s not much challenge  — you paint short legs and long black hair crowned with Mickey Mouse ears and voila, a Skye.

So listen to this offer:  I am prepared to give you the colour, length and style of hair you crave and a choice of eye colours.  Just be specific about what you want to weigh, for heaven’s sake.  I did a commission for a husband who mentioned in passing that the photo of his wife had been taken when she was heavier and that she had “lost some weight” since then.   That was as specific as he could manage, although I pressed him for a little more guidance.  I finally decided that taking off about twenty pounds would be a safe guess, and that’s how I painted her,   but when I finally met this charming woman, it was obvious that she had lost quite a bit more and was absolutely sylph-like.  She loved the painting but was just sorry that it showed her before her weight loss.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her.

When we say someone is “laying it on pretty thick,”  the comment is derogatory, keeping company with putting lipstick on a pig.  Personally, I have always thought pigs to be quite comely without makeup, but that is a topic for another day.  This evening I shall mount an argument for thick lay-ons.

Make no mistake — my heart belongs to glaze oil, where only the last few strokes of the brush might create texture or catch the light.   But it is a gas to drop all pretence of building a painting with patience and concentration and just lay it on in smears and gobs.  “Impasto” is definitely is a thing.  And what a thing if you are in the right mood!  You can layer up a painting knife with a range of colours and just drag that sucker to create the sense of mass.  You can scratch out “calligraphy” here and there, incidentally exposing the colour you have toned the canvas.    It’s texture on a drunken rampage.  As long as the extra paint doesn’t end up on the couch, everything is fair in love and impasto.

Only two caveats:

1. Impasto in a representational painting has to bear some logical relation to the subject matter.  Trees with gnarly bark are great, and rocky cliffs just beg for an impasto approach.  (However, believe me, impasto portraits are rarely appreciated by the subject.)

2.  Paint miser that I am, it always horrifies me how much pigment this technique hogs.  Have you priced paint lately???  Glaze oil is far more economical….but on the other hand...

So knock yourself out on small panels!  Imitate tectonic plate shifts, pushing and pulling that paint for all it’s worth.  Take your glasses off.  Have a sherry.  Trust me, you will have FUN.

Just wear your smock.  And have someone roll you in kraft paper when you are finished.  Who knows — you might even get an accidental print out of the exercise—I have my suspicions about some of Jackson Pollock's work or late Picasso,  although my personal favourite is that mad artist in the trapeze harness in The Big Lebowski.  (Must ask Jon about re-bracing our living room ceiling.)

"Knock yourself out" might have been the wrong advice.

​This wee painting reflects my delight with Newfoundland.  It represents a small fortune in paint.

"The only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out." (David Rakoff)

It is a truth universally acknowledged, as Jane A. might have said, that creative productivity is a hell of a lot easier to discuss than attain. (To wit, here I am, sitting here kvetching  rather than laying out a palette.)  The longer I (we) postpone the “deeply and unglamorous task” of pushing something original out, the more daunting becomes the prospect.  Yes, it is wildly busy here for reasons beyond our control (a family health crisis), but what do I do when I have ten minutes??  I read.  Ah,  yes.

Sometimes (often)  (usually) (always) text draws me and I read whatever is put in front of me.   And life can reward me beyond expectation.  This is James Agate on July 30, 1942:

Introducing “Miss Zelfredo, the world-famous snake-charmer’, the ringmaster said:  ‘It is with great regret that I have to announce one of the great tragedies of the Ring.  Doreen Zelfredo’s python, which had been with her for six years, died on Friday at Knowle.  I am sure the audience will join with me in sympathy for Doreen, and in the wish that she may soon find a new pal.  If ever woman loved a snake Doreen did.  Miss Zelfredo will now enter the ring and perform her act without her snake.”

Now you either find this  hilarious or you don’t.  I do and my explosive belly-laugh probably surprised the neighbourhood.  Life being synchronous, the next day I saw a bit on The Marvellous Mrs. Maizel which was a variation on the same gag.  A sad-sack performer arrives on stage and announces that his long-time partner is dead and that he is heart-broken.  Reaching into his bag he pulls out a ventriloquist’s dummy and lays it across a stool so that the head and the legs droop,  commenting:  “He committed suicide,”  Then, having dispensed with the challenge of ventriloquism, he does “their” act, filling in his own patter with what the dummy would have said, had he lived.   

And now I will tell you what my newest painting looks like….

This is going to be short because life is somewhat fraught right now.  I am hoping to find time to paint but….  So I have been looking for inspiration by trolling through the multitudinous images on my iMac and came across this one.  As you know, I harbour a desire to paint night scenes.  This particular harbour seems to be a no-go area because I have yet to pull a night scene off.   It’s all about remembering the colour of the light.  Unfortunately, my left brain is running this show like the little logical-sequential martinet it is, never more bossy than when it’s out of its area of expertise.   Meanwhile the gestalt right brain is literally asleep at the switch, having nodded off every time it gets dark.  (I used to get drowsy whenever I took my contacts out.  Now it seems to take only the setting of the sun.)

​Neural rewiring is possible, apparently.  A recent interview on Quirks and Quarks dealt with the amazing case study of a 7-year-old who had to have a substantial section of one hemisphere removed because of a cyst.  Scientists monitoring him over the next three years were utterly astonished to find that his brain had made new neural pathways;  his visual processing was functioning normally.

This sounded promising until the scientist went on to say that only a child’s developing brain  can pull off the starfish trick of regrowing a part.  So much for that.

So here we are.  This painting actually had some promise.  But subsequent layers destroyed the underpainting without improving anything.   I guess the lesson is to quit while you are ahead and resist the impulse to blunder ahead.  Walk away.  Make the supreme effort to look around outside after dark.  Come back when you know something.

Sincere thanks to the surviving part of my brain that reminded me to take a picture.