Reflections while waiting
#wrightwritesnow 131
The other day, I half-watched a video on Youtube billed as An Artist’s London Home Designed Solely for Painting, which had more to do with the Home&Garden perspective and less to do with the practicalities and advantages of making the home of Haidee Becker, the artist, an ideal place to be. I suppose I wanted to see a day in the life of this artist, more than anything else. The programme failed in that it did not highlight the best parts of the home which are not devoted to painting sufficiently well either!
I watched the above prompted by the sheer idleness induced by waiting for paintings to dry. Waiting for them to dry, not watching them. This oil painting lark is sorely testing my patience.
I am all the more impatient because a whole month has gone by since the last painting class. I have been prepared since then to begin my big coffee pot painting. We should have had a session last week, but our Prof. went off to Madeira for the weekend.
I thought we were supposed to start again after the Easter break on the Friday before that, so charged up the hill with my new canvas, protected by a slightly bigger piece of hardboard, both covered with a colourful African wrap, and tied up with twine. All this because a twenty-minute walk in windy Faro with a delicate canvas is a dangerous business.
Luckily, I stopped caring long ago about the curious gazers of passersby, although if I were boarding an African bus, instead of tramping the streets in Faro, Portugal, I would not have elicited any curiosity at all. It is even more fortunate that I have long arms, under which to tuck such ungainly cargo.
On arrival at my destination, I was a little disappointed to find the door closed—serves me right for ignoring the 100+ WhatApp messages, one of which told us when classes started again—and so I had to retrace my steps, still carrying my awkward parcel. I cannot start this painting at home, because walking with a still-wet canvas above my head would be impractical and look truly ridiculous. One has to draw the line somewhere, so to speak.
The other thing I am impatient to see is what our Prof. has done to the “joint effort” painting everyone in the class got to make marks on. When my turn came around, he said, “You can use your palette knife”. I was thinking of that, but once he had pronounced the words, I got permission to use my own paints too, and so did the sky and sea part of this image. The Prof. said he would send the photo we were using as a reference via WhatsApp, but he did not. Never mind. The sense of freedom I felt—and abandonment of responsibility, even—made the exercise such fun.
The other proper canvas I have is earmarked for arum lilies, which I will paint at home. I have done two preparatory paintings, and have done a sketch to scale on paper to rehearse the composition. On Saturday morning, however, I got the jitters about actually starting on the real canvas.
Instead, I picked up one of the “left-oeuvre” bits of hardboard, and decided to get rid of my jitters on that instead. I moved the huge and still wet Still Life with Onions and Brass Pan and Why Two Bottles of Olive Oil? off the easel to a safe location lined with cardboard, and put the large, barely started left-oeuvre on it instead. The result is Exploding Onion 02:
I am misleading you by saying I had arum-lily jitters. The real jitters come because my continued survival in my real job involves working hard on my marketing strategy. I have got some things down on paper, but much mulling over and writing of copy is required. When word of mouth is a Chatty Cathy, then life is grand, but Cathy is missing in action, and has seemingly removed herself from the airwaves, so needs must.
Mulling over can be done while painting.
Exploding Onion 02 has evolved since I took the above photo. I now have to wait for the paint to dry on that one, before I can make further changes. More waiting. I have also taken lots of photos of this particular onion before chopping it up, having some with my lunch, and freezing the rest.
Yesterday, I thought I might start the arum lily canvas.
But no. I still had mulling over to do. Not only on the stuff for the day job, but because I am in a quandary over the arum lily painting. I might end up flipping a coin: heads, and it will be the smooth blending of colours as soft and fine as the white of the flower; tails, palette-knife near-madness with a touch of finesse will ensue. The latter option exists only because I have now acquired several other palette knives, and it would provide the greater challenge.
I could do both. All I know is that mulling over which style of painting to follow should not be pursued while attempting to write marketing copy. It leads to the over-consumption of biscuits. And that’s all I am saying about that!
To partially resolve the arum lily quandary, I chickened out of starting on the canvas, and took out yet another large piece of hardboard instead, having decided to practise putting down the kind of background I intend for the arum lily on canvas project.
So, here is a picture of nothing:
So, now I have three separate paintings, all of which have to dry before I can take the next step. It is a perfect interlude to do some serious desk work — or go to the shops in search of vegetables to eat, as opposed to fodder for another still life.
And this is when the real reflections occurred. There is a new mural on a wall just before the entrance to the municipal library. So I took a selfie, thanks to the full-length windows of the Social Security headquarters on the other side of the road:
Here is the photo with its attribution, but please note the lack of completion of the colourway; obviously the pink was an afterthought:
I wonder if I should go there with my Stanley knife and remove the weeds from the calçada at the base of this work? I worry that the weeds are part of the installation, somehow drawing a parallel between what looks like algae in the sea, and weeds fallen on stony ground. I promise I will leave the pink in the image. I have no wish to branch out into graffiti. Perhaps I should just leave well alone.
In any case, I see a former client of mine has just uploaded another paper to Academia.edu. I see the translation of the Abstract has three errors: one the writer herself habitually makes; the other, an unfortunate hazard of machine translation/AI translation, involving the inability of discerning whether “he” or “it” is meant when using the French pronoun “il”, and an omission of a phrase. So, that PDF promises to be at least a 20-minute read. Before I offer the necessary amendments to this author, since I hold her in high esteem and wish for others to do the same, I need to finish a blog post about a book she published in July 2024 that is part of my portfolio, by which time Hell might have frozen over, but the paint will certainly be dry on all three canvases.
