Thursday, April 4th

Spent the night cleaning my brushes which is such a Zen meditation for me and a reminder of how important my tools are. They require proper maintenance. Also tidied up the studio in preparation of the upcoming show and fooled around with some color ideas-see below.

"Disney Fantasy"

So, what we have here is a 16"x24" canvas with 4 oil pastel sticks (small) that I thought would translate really nicely as a larger work. Now, the pastels I used are very different from the RF oil sticks that I work with and I usually use the 16x24 as a model for the larger canvas' to see if the color ideas work. Think Debussy...

"Colorado"

So this how it worked out on a 3'x4' canvas using RF oil sticks. I turned it upside down and it took another dimension. Blue sky, snowy mountains, green forests etc et al ( hence Colorado) and as my visual patron Joan Mitchell used to say, "I carry landscapes around inside of me." But it's not what I wanted (cosmic laughs can be inserted at this juncture) but I'm not giving up. The light in my wee studio is terrible for photos but is a fair approximation of the colors used but the 4th shade is washed out. Gonna let it dry some and do a layer of the original oil pastels over the  RF oil sticks which I used for this iteration. Laurie loves this but I'm missing the Debussy dreaminess of the smaller study which for some goofy reason I named "Disney Fantasy." I think in honor of the first movie I saw-1953/54 "Peter Pan" at a drive-in outside of Gary Indiana. There was a nature trailer before the movie on coral reefs with music that 20 years later I recognized as Debussy's "La Mer."  Sorry for the self-indulgent digression but it is my blog...

So let's see how this works out-I will venture that it becomes something completely different and will be the painting "it' wants to be. I am not the author-only the messenger.