Tantivy

I bought an original painting by Francis Matia , soon to be Vicki's daughter-in-law. Her style is a little edgier than mine as you will notice. It is not really what you would expect in a mostly Arts and Crafts style house, but I like it here. This is the view as you come in our front door. No helper in the studio today but I got some work done. The banner on the blog today is the newest pour and I did some beginning work on it. Don't ask me what it means or what things are because I really don't know.  The white is glare from my flash. I like this so far, but I am going mark by mark and really feeling my way. Here is The Girl. She is either finished or very close to it. She also has a glare from the flash on her dress. I am not sure why she is sitting there. Maybe she is thinking about her "parfait gentil knight", or maybe she is considering the cloistered life. Daydreaming, that is certain. Chattanooga is having "Wine Over Water" next week...

You just never know what the day will bring, do you? Articles in magazines which feature different studios sometimes have pictures of the artist's studio helper. The helper is usually a dog or fluffy cat. Today I had a studio helper... He was on the side of my water container and I noticed him when I rinsed my brush.  He was patient with my taking his "portrait" and  crawled around for a long while then he was gone - and my neck started feeling very exposed. Sara was stung by a wasp this summer and it was not pretty. My neck kept feeling very vulnerable and a little creepy; I finally gave up and came in the house. Several of his friends were with him and I think that tomorrow we might have to spray or I will have to wear long sleeved, high-necked shirts with long pants and a veil! Here is the girl. Who needs her mother, a guy   anyone else. Since I took this photo I have evened out the sky, but I didn't get another photo. Too many "hel...

I don't know what happened to last week, but I turned around and suddenly it was gone! I lost my new red lipstick. Horrors! Today I found it again. Thank goodness! I am only now getting accustomed to wearing it. I bought a different but similar red for my purse, just in case, so I haven't been colorless these last few days. I had dropped into a bag I took on a trip. Today was the first of the next set of painting classes. There are such good artists in the class that I feel very out of place. However, hope springs eternal and I might get something good done yet. Here is what I have done to the picture of the boy and girl. I will paint this out and make something else of it, but I had to try this before I did. I just like this girl's face . If I can figure how to make the scene more interesting I might save it yet but I am not holding my breath. I will work on it with the drawing program I have on my iPad and see what I can do. Suggestions? While I was waiting ...

I am surrounded by Paris today. My favorite comic, Stone Soup , has Joan thinking and dreaming about going to Paris. Jane LaFazio posted a blog about her trip to Paris here  and Chrissy posted for two days about Versailles and an art exhibit (bodacious)  here . I am ready to pack and go. I have actually had the pleasure of a few days in Paris with a friend who needed a companion when her husband made a trip there then had to Fly back to Cincinnati and back to Paris. The waiters are, essentially, rude as promised but the city is lovely. The Eiffel tower, such a cliche in so many ways, when lighted at night is a twinkling jewel. I want to go again, to spend a few more days in that magical city. So many things to do, so little time, so little money. So instead I bought some rugs for the doorways. The rugs are made from 30%post-consumer recycled plastic bottles. Since I recycle, I feel that I should buy things made with my recyclables so that there is a market for them. Wo...

Here is the local news. The headline of Friday's paper. We did not go to the festivities, which were in Charleston, TN, just up the road from here. Aren't small towns great! Cowpeas, for your information, include black-eye peas, crowder peas and some other similar peas which were once fed to cows but have migrated to the table. And yes, there is a cowpea Princess. Remember when I showed you my "carpentry"? Well, the dowels had a tendency to slip out of the holes in the shelf supports so I had to do the girl fix on them. That means that I didn't go to the hardware store, buy any tools, any parts or any of those things that men seem to have to do to fix anything. These rubber bands come on the newspaper (see above) and they pile up unless you throw them away. I was glad to recycle them. Now for the story. When I first began taking painting classes I made a green and red pour. I looked at it and looked at it and finally saw a dress and thought that ther...

I did not get any yard work done today before the claw truck came and they don't come again for two weeks, so I bypassed yard work today. However, I did work in the studio. Here are the pieces I have been working on. This is the newest piece. As you can tell, it is not finished and I don't even know what I will do to finish it at this point. To me it is rather Jane -ish or Cathy-ish or something related to English authors of a certain era. Vicki thinks it is Cinderella-ish - the Disney version, not the German. No toes cut off here. I made the background of this piece some time ago - maybe a year. It isn't a painting on its on, so I decided to do something with it. As you can see, this isn't finished either. You can see that I have chalked in some leaves and there might even be another blossom somewhere. Working with white and different values of it was interesting. I am looking forward to finishing this. This is an old piece that I reworked. Sandy said th...

How can I lose two pairs of plant clippers? Dean bought me one soon after we moved here and it disappeared. Then he bought me another. Now it has gone. I thought that the first might have fallen into the compost bin so I emptied it; it needed turning, so I bit the bullet. All the way to the bottom and no clippers. Now I have to shovel it all back in and Dean suggests that I add some dirt as I go. I won't tell you what I wanted to suggest to him! The store had no more of those very nice clippers so I have another kind. These will probably last; I don't like them as well. He did help me limb up the Crepe Myrtle and it looks much better. The trunks should show on this tree and it had branches to the bottom. It needs to be moved but that will have to wait until cooler weather or maybe until the spring. Dean has been spraying weeds, as you can see. My idea is that if it is green, cut it and call it lawn, but wanting a monoculture lawn if something he got from his father and...

I guess that we never stop learning or wanting to learn. I want to learn how to wear red lipstick. I, who rarely wear lipstick at all, remembered reading an article by a (male) makeup expert who said that older women look good in red lipstick and then I saw a picture of a woman with beautiful silver-grey hair , shoulder length and smooth, wearing red lipstick and I was sold. So yesterday, I bought red lipstick. In fact, I dragged sister Vicki all the way to Knoxville to shop with me. Now I have found out that wearing red lipstick takes practice. If it smears, everyone knows. If you rub you lips together a little too far, everyone knows. And I will have to be careful at church tomorrow because I don't think that altar guild ladies would like trying to get my red lipstick off the purificator after the rim of the chalice is wiped. My mouth is not actually this crooked, I have just rubbed my lips together crooked. And, by the way, taking a picture of yourself never really works all...

It is not all about my painting here. For the last several days I have been searching for my favorite earrings, bought at a jewelry store on Sanibel and much more expensive than my usual earrings. I couldn't find them anywhere and they are my favorites. They look good on the suede mouse pad, don't they? Even better on my ears, though. I found them here in the outside pocket of my shoulder bag. I think that I had worn them at Sara's house and picked them up and put them in there so I wouldn't leave them there. I thought that I had looked in the purse but I had evidently skipped over the outside pocket. If you are going to search, do a thorough one. That is my new mantra. Having found the earrings I began looking for the pair of jeans I had misplaced. Now misplacing a pair of jeans isn't as easy as loosing track of a pair of earrings, but I had done it. I had been looking for days, maybe a week or more. I wanted to wear them. I even looked to see if I had take...