One more session

#wrightwritesnow 129

As a direct response to international news on all fronts, I find myself unable to articulate my thoughts in speech or in writing, although I do have them.

Once upon a time, I was vociferous amongst like-minded peers, but I have long ago rid myself of any wish to reignite the angry young woman I was of yesteryear. The young woman who lived on a different continent and traversed seemingly different landscapes from the ones I now inhabit still lives within me. She occasionally pokes me in the ribs, having taken up the role of shrewd, unpaid consultant, and that is good enough for me. She reminds me of that thing called hope, and gives latinate advice, such as carpe diem.

My geographical location and other variables afford me the privilege of retreat as global madness proliferates. Attempts at maintaining personal equilibrium have me looking at small things.

And by small things, I am not referring to bits and pieces I sweep up off the kitchen floor, but those things I see in my domestic environment, and sometimes a little further afield, that I can grasp at the end of a paintbrush.

Today, for example, I resolved what colour the bottles in the picture below should be. You should know that I have been thinking about this for about six weeks. You should also know that, given the current level of my paint-mixing skills, this whole mission felt like a very daring proposition.

One other thing to mention is that minor touches to the said bottles and other elements in the picture can only be attended to once the paint applied in the last three days has dried. One more session should do it, with a bit of luck.

Four months of learning curves lie below the current layer of paint. Oil on canvas from the recycling bins, 55 x 135 cm. Some of the shiny bits are wet paint. Other shiny bits are still missing.

While executing the bottles mission, I had a little hardboard offcut to one side on which I tested out my colour combinations as a hedge against ruining the big picture at this late stage, and acquainted myself with the slightly different technique required to paint on hardboard (since I have a huge prepared haul of the stuff). It also served as a sketch for something at a later date that does not veer off into the semi-abstract and is not limited by the few colours—and the paucity of white, not to mention the small quantity of paint—on my palette today.

Arum Lily Got the Blues, Oil on hardboard, 45 x 14 cm

While looking at this photo, I was suddenly reminded of Wallace Stevens, and his poem The Man With The Blue Guitar, excerpts of which can be found here.

I have wondered whether the enthusiasm I have for this new painting hobby of mine is simply an elaborate way of avoiding the hard work of writing beyond the confines of blog posts, which is the reason I began this Substack at the beginning of 2025.

I decided that this was not the case, since the painting feeds off my writing, and vice versa, yet while I have no compunction in publicising my amateur attempts at painting, I cannot bring myself to reveal any serious writing that I know falls short of the mark. Yes, my mark. So, please forgive me (for I have already forgiven myself!) while I scribble away in private and brood about it all while painting.

Of course, I expressed none of these reservations early on Friday evening when my seven-year-old friend Gabriel passed by my front door and saw me with three paint brushes in my hand while I worked on the curtained backdrop of the brass pan painting. The child is curious, and wanted to come in and see what I was doing, so I invited him in, since his father was not in any particular hurry this time.

He stood in front of the version of the Still Life with Onions and Brass Pan and Why Two Bottles of Olive Oil? as it was then, and said in a soft, sincere voice, “It is beautiful”. I showed him a few other things, and he spent some time looking at my left-oeuvres collection at the front door, as I explained they were abstracts using whatever paint was still left on my palette at the end of painting class, so as not to waste it. Hopefully, by telling him that as abstracts, they were not paintings of anything in particular, as such, but depended partly on the imagination of the person looking at them, I have not contravened any more erudite definition that might exist. The kid got it, because he started telling me what he could see in each of the four little pastiches.

Then I showed him (and his father,, standing behind him just outside the door) another example of an abstract, my Version No 01 of an Exploding Onion (scroll down for image at link), which he looked at with interest. Bear in mind that he had been looking at the three non-exploding onions in my big painting minutes earlier.

Then Gabriel asked me, “Are onions the only thing you can draw?” I shot a smile to his father”, but gave the boy a possibly odd, but honest, response, “No, but I want to discover all the aspects about the onion and how to express them.” I thought about talking about layers, but kept that to myself because I did not want to freak the kid out. Besides, he can—and probably will—contemplate the layers of an onion all on his own.

He replied, “Hide that one from my mother, when she comes, because she is allergic to onions.” Oh,” I said, and over his head gave his father an amused look, “an allergy?”. His father changed the subject by saying that Gabriel also likes to paint, and I suggested that he might like to come and paint with me sometime, since I had heaps of things to paint on. This is unlikely to happen, since the boy has lots of extra-curricular activities, but I imagine it might result in him showing me at least a couple of his paintings by and by.

I left my guffaw about the onion allergy (for I have never heard of such a thing, and I have seen his mother carrying home take-away chicken which I know for a fact is cooked with garlic, also an Allium vegetable) for well after this visit was over, when I recalled the loudness and obviousness of my own father’s so-called allergy to the over-consumption of fried onions. It was a subject of much hilarity in our childhood household, although I do remember my mother was never quite so amused as my sister and I.

Yeah. Small things.