Sky Blue Reflections

Sky Blue Reflections, working title

Stamped with my name, but an UNFINISHED landscape, in acrylic, on a twenty by twenty gallery stretched  canvas. In spite of the best made plans to open the studio doors at ten, life kept getting in the way. Four days (not in a row) was the best I could do this last week. Life gets in the way--as does style. The style of this painting, my affinity for macro close ups of details in the woods and my fondness for line is probably a good indication that a painting every two weeks is me. So be it.

And it's also great that Data Recovery Group got all of my photos, videos and documents off that external drive! I am most thrilled to have back the family pictures and the stupid videos of me making a fool of myself  that I wanted to delete, but the kids said no.  I am grateful to them and thinking one terabyte for the next laptop in my life. My data was only 38 GB. One terabyte is 1000 GB.  An external drive or SkyDrive storage is only for backup. What a hard lesson.

Wildfire

Wildfire, 36 x 36", acrylics, in progress once again.

I got out my acrylics for the first time in months, maybe a year?  This painting was the perfect painting to jump into the day before surgery, ( Mark upon mark, color upon color, I could do no wrong. With a painting like this, you just let your self go and respond to  the reference photo--which is actually a rather sedate landscape  with normal landscape colors--sap green, olive--I don't need to tell you. It's a continuous drawing experience. Though it looks done, it isn't.  All the intensity I feel towards the Fall season, (which I do not welcome; it precedes winter) is not there yet. I haven't found the cohesive gray yet. This will be like Summer Shade, a painting that builds over time till I say, yes, that's it.  Landscapes, more about feelings than depicting a scene, provide  perfect balance to the more demanding genre, portraiture. 

UPDATE: it's the day after surgery. My knee is great. The rest of me is hung over. The saline solution they mix the anesthetics in nearly killed me. Saline is salt. Salt in such large quantities sets off my chronic vertigo. Ellis and I didn't talk about this with the anesthesia doctor and he didn't catch it when we were talking about the drugs I take to control the vertigo. The overdose led to a horrible day. Lots of nausea, dizziness and headache.

Today I' m on the mend. Still dizzy, but not nauseous. No energy for drawing, though;I'm hoping later. That will be a sign that I'm on the mend.Meanwhile, my knee is incidental. I'm hardly noticing it. Ellis is one fantastic guy. In spite of my sometimes very annoying personality, he cares enough to stick around and learn how to make my oatmeal. Now he can make bagel, lox and cream cheese sandwiches, old fashioned oatmeal and add noodles to chicken/ matzoh ball soup.His culinary skills are expanding. Next: scrambled eggs. He's my honey. I'm his baby. I'm never going to let him go.