Random Stuff

Teddy and I headed out to the Big Empty yesterday. Still a lot of people here looking at cranes. Teddy and I dealt with probably 20 cars even though it wasn’t an especially nice day. I put a good face on it, but a few of them are pretty inconsiderate and treat that holy place and its avatars like commodities. I don’t really understand them, but there they are. A guy with a huge lifted Dodge truck parked and left the driver door open blocking the way. He had a huge lens on his camera and it was all about the photograph for him. I guess it’s not for me to judge. Still, I couldn’t help but think that the cranes might have liked the spring of 2021 more than this spring. I know I saw much more of them that year and, while it might not be true, it seemed that the cranes were more relaxed. I can’t imagine they like all the traffic, either.

But Teddy was a good boy and, as far as we were concerned, a good time was had by both. A few cranes flew high above us, and many, many Canada geese. There is a pair of geese who’ve taken up occupancy on top of a muskrat house and right now, they are my favorites. They are always together and every time I see them, one is curled up with its head tucked in its feathers and the other is standing tall, the lord of all he/she surveys from about 18 inches above the water. The road is showing wear and tear from the recent traffic and where it was once a nice, smooth gravel road, it’s gone washboard.

“The great lessons from the true mystics, from the Zen monks, is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends, and family, in one’s back yard, and that travel may be a flight from confronting the sacred. To be looking everywhere for miracles is a sure sign of ignorance that everything is miraculous. ~ Abraham H. Maslow, Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences

I think maybe the past few years might have turned me into a bit of a misanthrope…

I did something yesterday I have not done since I moved here and “decorated.” I took down a painting and hung a new one. I’ve painted a lot in the past several years, but nothing I wanted to hang, even though I love most of the work I’ve done. A couple paintings hang in the spare room, but that’s essentially storage. The snow painting is on the living room wall now where I can see it. I picked the frame because it is the color of the other plants growing out there, greasewood. The design cut into the white is evocative of greasewood in snow. There is no greasewood (Chico) in my painting, but it was there. I’d like to hang the big crane painting but someone would need to drill some holes and sink some mollies for that to happen. The Big Crane Painting is on my paintings page. 🙂

https://marthakennedy.wordpress.com/paintings-drawings-and/#jp-carousel-71739

Otherwise, I’ve caught a cold — the first one in years. I don’t feel like a sturdy oak tree, and the timing couldn’t be worse, well, probably it could be worse, but this is pretty bad. OH well…

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2023/03/18/rdp-saturday-oak/

Resquiesat in Pace, White Box

Yesterday the heating element on my dryer died. Yep. After the usual post-mortem imprecations one offers large, expensive, appliances when they shrug off this mortal coil (literally) I began my search for a replacement. The Sears Hometown store — from which I procured my new fridge last spring when my old fridge died — has closed permanently. The easy solution gone — POOF! An appliance store in Alamosa is possible. Repair guy? Maybe I’ll find one. And then… Since I couldn’t take any action I had to (oh no!!!) think…

Wait a minute. I live in a windy desert. “Imprecation! I don’t have to do this right now!!!”

So I won’t. I lived an El Niño year in China without a dryer. Most of the people I’ve known in Europe don’t have a dryer — some have a cool machine that does both. After it washes the clothes, it extracts water from the wet clothes. All one machine. I want that. It was kind of a pain in Iceland where the humidity was 9,000,000%, but here? Where the weather is dry and it’s just me? And those machines aresmall. To use my back door (not the storm door) I have to move my dryer out of the way. That means, all winter for 8 years I’ve had to move my dryer back and forth whenever I wanted to close the door — that’s all winter and whenever I leave town. This house was built nearly a hundred years ago, long before appliances as I know them. Once upon a time, the kitchen had a wood stove.

So…since fixing my car’s hatch door is more important to me right now than the dryer, I’ll see how that goes before I jump into any financially burdensome appliance decisions. Anyway, what I really want is someone to take that thing out of my laundry room and haul it away.

In other news I framed the snow painting, and I love it. It’s not going anywhere. It’s going to hang above my table here, a reminder of the end of a strange time in my life and a beautiful walk with my much loved Polar Bear Yeti T. Dog. I don’t know what the frame is made from, but I think steel. 😉 It’s very hard wood and broke off the tips of two screw-eyes yesterday, so it’s still not hangable, but maybe today I will bring in Mr. Drill to have a chat with it. Whatever the wood is, it’s very pretty.

That’s the quotedium update for March 14, 2023.

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2023/03/14/rdp-imprecation/

Buon Fresco

In 2006 I went to Fresco School in LA. It was a wonderful weekend. I stayed in a hotel in Venice Beach and commuted to school. School wasn’t far, either. School was in one of Howard Hughes’ Hangars in what was once an airfield (and if I’m lucky I’ll remember the name of it…).

It had been — and remains! — a dream to paint buon fresco — that’s painting onto wet plaster. My teacher was from Russia — Ilia Anossov — and while I give him a “C” as an instructor, I give him an A+ as a person and fresco enthusiast. He gets a C because he took my brush out of my hand and finished my fresco for me (grrrrrrrrrrrrrr). Still, I really like the guy and loved the class. I even understand his impulse. He is a big-hearted guy and he didn’t want me to fail. Sometimes it’s hard to believe a student is OK with failing, and I was.

Class was two long days over St. Patrick’s Day. My hotel room was really a small apartment with a kitchen. When I arrived the first afternoon a random bum-like homeless guy at the parking lot said he’d watch my car for me. I don’t know what his story was but he was splendid and possibly he did watch my car. Strangely, he didn’t want any money. There are a lot of mysterious interactions in our world and at this point I’m half-way convinced that some of them are not with humans but with some other kind of human-like form of something. That guy was one of them.

So…on my way home from my first class I stopped at a supermarket to get something for dinner. I’d completely forgotten it was St. Patrick’s day wrapped up as I was in the magic and wonder of painting fresco. As I stood in line, waiting my turn, I felt a sharp pinch on my arm. “Huh?”

I turned around. An older woman with gray hair under a headscarf was grinning at me. “Sure you’re Irish,” she asked with a lilt in her voice. “Where’s your green? Don’t tell me your underwear. I haven’t believed that since elementary school.”

I cracked up. I admitted to being Irish and apologized for my lack of awareness over what day it was. We chatted.

I bought some gross food I cooked in a skillet in my apartment and went to bed. During the night, I heard intriguing sounds coming from upstairs and felt surprised at the nature of my hotel.

Before class even began we had to do two sketches, a value drawing and a color sketch because, when the plaster is ready, the artist needs to know exactly what he/she is doing. There is a small window of opportunity to paint. It’s a real “carpe diem” thing with plaster.

The colored sketch I hd to prepare for class — if I’d been smart, I’d have chosen something simpler.

We painted our frescoes on the back of 14 x 14 inch tiles — a perfect surface. All of it was wonderful to me. My fresco turned out badly, though there are worse out there. My teacher painted the two top apples, and they don’t’ look like apples to me. OH well… To my eye, the best part is about three square inches in one corner, the wicker chair. Luckily it broke a month or so later so I have never had to move it or look at it. (Featured photo)

I love the medium, but it’s complicated and expensive and needs a lot of space. The most wonderful moment was when Ilia showed us an old coffee can filled with dry pigment for ultramarine blue. The pigment was left over from the Depression when so many fresco murals were commissioned by WPA for public buildings. I got to grind that paint and use it. That was the best part of everything.

WPA paint. 💙

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2023/03/13/rdp-monday-pinch/

Garden Sign

Yesterday was just one of those days, so I grabbed some plywood and painted a garden sign. I just hung it on the fence. Now I think it wants me to sign it with my Chinese name and add my chop. Maybe… He was a lot of fun to paint and inevitably, painting cheers me up.

Sedges in Snow

I don’t know exactly what goes into a painting. Whatever my “process” is, it’s as mysterious to me as to anyone else. I do know that since July, painting has been all but impossible for me. Covid brain is a real thing. I found it very difficult to hold an idea. It was as if parts of my brain just wouldn’t connect to other parts. I did do a painting in there somewhere, sunflowers with acrylic using a palette knife. I did that painting to try out the knife (I only have one) and to have something to hang in the show at the museum. I liked it a lot, and it seemed to prevision something changed in Martha the Painter. I wasn’t sure I could paint at all which is why I used the knife. I knew I didn’t know how to use a palette knife. It’s a simple painting of a common scene; nothing fancy but friendly and likable. I could also paint this in a very short time so there wasn’t the challenge of maintaining the image in my mind.

Last Summer acrylic on panel, painted October, 2022

What makes a painting, for the painter, anyway, might be more than the result. For me it is.

I love painting more than anything else I do. It’s just a wonderful thing to me, engrossing, intriguing. All of my paintings have been experiments because each one changes me and moves me to a different place along whatever might be my personal painting trajectory. I like that journey. Paint is part of it — just that, paint itself — and the image in my mind is another part. Doing the work is a pathway I’ve never traveled. I’m not sure I can explain this clearly because it’s not a word thing.

I think of the painters in the past, and I’m sure some of them must have loved painting. I think Turner must have. Kandinsky. Georgia O’Keefe definitely loved it. The jubilation in van Gogh’s work says to me he probably loved it, too. Back in the days when painting was a trade more than an ‘art’ those guys must have loved it, too, even though it meant a lot of hard work and the development of far more skills than painters today need to know.

I have an amazing book, On Divers Arts. That’s “diverse” not divers, but anyway. It’s by a guy, a priest, who’s writing under the name “Theophilus,” friend of God. His friendship with God is real. It’s not just that he is a priest, but also because of the way he regards all the material he works with. It would be a different blog post to go into that, so I won’t. But I share his feelings. Paint itself is a miracle.

Theophilus’ mission in writing the book was to pass down to the future all the things he knew about making art for a church and it’s practically everything — from pigments for the wall and manuscripts to the lead that holds stained glass in windows and the glass itself. It was written in the 13th century. I have found it very inspiring even though I don’t understand most of the technical instruction. The most inspiring part to me is the dedication where Theophilus explains to the person reading his instruction that the act of creating something is partaking in a little shred of the divine through physical gifts that have been passed to him through time. It feels that way to me.

For the past few days I’ve been really painting. It’s been the good stuff where I didn’t know where I was going and had to completely let go. All I had was a day week before last when Bear and I rushed out to the Refuge to catch the snow before it quit falling. We walked into a day unlike any I had ever seen. Bear and I wandered through a mystery.

Yesterday, when I finished this, I felt I’d painted that beautiful snowy afternoon.

FYI this is really just a painting of snow, fog and sedges. It’s not symbolic of anything. You’re welcome to see anything you want in the image, just don’t tell me 😀

It’s oil on acrylic primed linen canvas. The paint is Gamblin’s Flake White Replacement, a titanium based white designed to mimic lead white. Indian yellow, lapis ultramarine, and Gamblin Portland Gray. Gamblin is a paint company in Oregon. Most of their paint uses safflower oil rather than linseed oil because it doesn’t yellow over time but to make it true to the original paint, the flake white replacement uses linseed oil. The lapis ultramarine is from Daniel Smith. Indian yellow is very luminous, truly, and I chose it because there was no other color that day so the sedges seemed lit from the inside which, in a way, they were, holding summer’s sunlight in their persistent stems.

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2023/02/06/rdp-monday-fancy/

Thought I’d Write About Dogs for a Change

Yesterday was day three of the Teddy T. Dog Transformation Workshop in which Teddy is made over from the land-demon from hell into a responsive, well-adjusted, adorable little guy who doesn’t try to kill his human.

Not that Teddy tried to kill me but a little melodrama doesn’t hurt a blog post that will inevitably be like many others I’ve written.

We had a great walk, again, with minimal fighting of the Halti. I realized that the connection between the leash and the Halti was heavy for such a little dog and when we got home I set up a new system using a lighter leash with a different connector. It worked. I also began training Teddy to put his nose into the Halti. He’s getting it.

On our walk, Teddy was great. It felt as if there was nothing on the end of the leash. When I got home I gave some thought to Teddy vs. Bear. First, dogs don’t really mature “intellectually” until they’re 3 years old or so. Teddy is just 4. Bear did most of the early doghood education. She house trained him and taught him the routine of Casa di Martha. But there is no way she could teach him how to walk on a leash safely with me.

Dogs like Bear are famous for their intuition. Training Bear was no work at all. She picked up most things from Dusty T. Dog who was very well-trained. Besides my work with him, during the six weeks I rehabbed from my first hip surgery (2007) he stayed with a professional trainer where he learned, among other things, to walk at heel without a leash.

Beyond that, Bear can sense what’s going on with me. It’s pretty amazing but true. The livestock these dogs are bred to protect aren’t “teaching” the dogs anything. The dogs are learning from each other if there are more than one and from the livestock themselves. Most of the time they aren’t even near “their” human. Bear learned to walk with me from walks with Dusty (who didn’t need a leash) and from me. I understand that Bear wasn’t bred to be a house dog. I get who she is, and I’m happy to stand there while she smells things, and she’s happy to stand there while I stare into the Big Empty thinking about how strange and beautiful it is. I think it would be a pretty maddening walk for others to share, even a little dog.

There’s not much snow left out there for me to crunch my way through. As my little dog walked beside me (!!!!) I thought of snow and crunch and how we learn words. There are words like “crunch” that always bring up the moment I learned the word and the activity that goes with it. My brother and I walked to school every day. One day my dad asked me (maybe I was in 2nd grade) “Hey MAK, I used to walk to school too. I love the way the snow crunched when I walked. Do you notice that?”

I was bewildered. To me “crunch” required something different from snow. Cellophane paper crunched, for that matter, paper crunched when you balled it up, or hard candy crunched between your teeth, or potato chips were crunchy. Snow??? But my dad was right most of the time. I said, “When it freezes on top?”

“No, honey, fresh snow. Bill Kelly (his best friend) and I used to walk across Pioneer Park (Billings, MT) to school and the snow crunched. Listen sometime, OK?”

The requirements for snow crunch? Fresh, dry snow has the best crunch of all. But every time it happens, I have this conversation with my dad. I was taught to notice that.

I was no different from Teddy. I had to be told things. I responded to what I was told and, clearly, remembered it. Bear, on the other hand? She seems to have been born knowing almost everything.

In other news, the sweet aroma of linseed oil again fills the house. I started a painting yesterday. I haven’t done anything in there (studio) since early last summer. When I got Covid in late June, and then long Covid, I couldn’t hold an idea or image in my mind long enough to imagine how to paint it. It was actually worse than that; I couldn’t imagine even how I would paint something. BUT the cloudy, foggy, gray, lightless day out there last week seems to be where I’m starting.

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2023/02/02/rdp-thursday-crunch/

And Yet ANOTHER Walk With Polar Bear Yeti T. Dog

It’s alleged that the cranes will come earlier this year because of a lack of food down there at Bosque del Apache in New Mexico. If they do, they’ll be here a while as there is no open ground at their next stop. In advance of the influx of Crane Tourists and the 40th Anniversary Crane Festival of Song and Story, Bear and I headed out for a walk yesterday even though the wind blowing from the southwest did not demur, but blasted like a MOFO. It was blowing so hard it seemed to suck my breath away, but probably it was just blowing at me so hard I couldn’t exhale. I’ve been out there in heavy winds before, but yesterday was a little different.

As I fought the wind, I thought “Chinook.” My friend in Wyoming could use a wind like that with her sheep out in deep snow. The situation is dire. Deep snow has covered the ground so the sheeps’ usual winter grazing is inaccessible and food — for the sheep, the dogs and the men caring for them — has had to be trucked in. The road is dangerous in winter and there have been numerous wrecks. You can read about it on her blog, Ladder Ranch.

“The warm wind kept blowing
…like a low chant from the land
or like the flurry of far wings…
lapping up the snow…
until the whole body of earth
lay brown and breathing
except for the topknots of buttes
and, away and away,
the high float of mountains…
Chinook…
Promise of Spring.”

A.B. Guthrie, Jr., from These Thousand Hills.

As happens, when we turned around with our backs to the wind, the day felt completely different. Bear found a patch of snow with some appealing scents to roll in. I studied the light changing on distant Mt. Herard. The wind was blowing snow over the Sand Dunes at the base of the mountain. I tried a photograph (featured photo), but the phone does not really have a powerful telephoto lens so it looks like a paint by number painting but you might get the idea.

As I photographed Mt. Herard I saw my reflection in my phone screen. I very very very seldom take selfies because I prefer the illusion to the reality of my appearance, but yesterday it was just too funny.

Bear is pretty well trained, but we’re doing a refresher course. Taking each dog out separately means Bear doesn’t get half a walk; she gets the whole thing to herself. I’m helping her understand that so she’s not in a rush to get to the scents. I don’t know if she understands the theory behind this, but it doesn’t matter. Theories might be for humans. For Bear the reality is we aren’t in a hurry any more because no over-enthusiastic, passionate, little land demon is pulling us. She’s getting it. I realized that yesterday when she stopped in front of me, leaned against me, and wouldn’t move. “OK Bear. We really do have all day.” I swear, she sighed.

I have had a couple of happy blips in my life as an artist. Last week a man in Tennessee did the research needed to find me. He’d bought notecards from my defunct Etsy shop two years ago and wanted more. Yesterday I learned that Colorado Central Magazine wants to run my painting of the Cranes on a Windy Day with the article instead of the photos I submitted from the festival’s media kit. 😊

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2023/01/31/rdp-tuesday-demur/

More Quotedium Musing…

After a night of pretty much no sleep (why?) here I am again with the coffee, the dogs, the rawhide pencils and the word for today is recharge. Boy, that hit a chord, but I have no idea how to effect that — though I could definitely use it. (Another gulp of coffee.)

A few days ago I woke up and realized that the long covid had finally gone. It was a very strange feeling. Little by little over the past six months — that monster has finally completely wandered off.

But now what? I feel a little disoriented, awakening in a different world.

I started cleaning out/up the studio. Not with anything particular in mind. I have no inspiration and the paints are very very very cold, sort of like cold butter or margarine. My studio isn’t heated and it really is as cold as a refrigerator in there. I have a glimmer of a painting in the back of my mind and I think it will probably happen. It will be a landscape, of course. I sense it will have a backstory, though. It won’t be “just” a landscape. I think it’s going to be a picture of my life from last July to, well, more or less, now.

I keep wondering why I paint at all since everything just ends up packed carefully in boxes in the garage, but whatever. I like to paint. I could either work harder to find a gallery or accept that I’m painting things to box up and put in the garage. To be fair, though, a couple are wrapped carefully and kept in the spare bedroom.:-) My house is small; the walls are old-school lath and plaster. Hanging something is complicated AND the walls a pretty full anyway. One of the paintings needs a frame. That will happen when I’m paid for reading the books sometime this spring.

ChatGPT would say (of itself) that it’s designed to do what it does, so it does it. I guess I can look at painting the same way. It’s what I do; maybe I was designed to paint. 😀

Yesterday my neighbors and I met at E’s house for a tea party that turned out to be a birthday party for me. E made cheesecake for the event and gave me a pair of beautiful handmade wool socks. I haven’t really hung out with anyone for the past several weeks other than interviewing people. I’ve been reading books and writing an article oh yeah and getting sucked into ChatGPT. For various other reasons, the three of us haven’t been able to get together since before Christmas.

So… here’s hoping we all get the recharge we need so we can…

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2023/01/25/rdp-wednesday-recharge/

Gone to the Dogs

Another intense week draws to a close but I KNOW better than to complain about it. It could be a LOT more intense and at least as bad. Yesterday I did the 15 questions, one of which was What are you most looking forward to in 2023? I responded that I had no idea and that, “…it’s all big crapshoot.”

The author of the questions didn’t agree that it’s a crapshoot. That’s OK, but I look back on this year and I could NEVER have predicted anything that happened and NONE of it was anything I looked “forward” to. It seemed that things just happened, mostly randomly. As far as I recall the only thing I looked forward to in 2022 was the arrival of the Sandhill Cranes. I can say the same for 2023, but I’m in no hurry. Soon after they leave, the deer flies arrive.

The past couple of years have shaken us all up, I think. Certainly they’ve shaken me up to the point where I’m afraid even to write something on the calendar like it’s going to happen.

I ended up going to the little art show at the museum. Luckily, I got there after the “crowds” had gone. It was quiet, and I felt, pretty safe from the boogie monsters. The fiddle player was there with his dog, Lola. Lola was actually the draw — I saw a little video of Johnny playing the fiddle, and his dog walked through the frame. I’d heard about Lola at the fancy dinner, so I cleaned up (somewhat) and headed out. Lola is a great dog. It was worth the trip. Not just Lola, but the continual sweet surprise of this community. I will never, never get used to it.

Louise, the former director, used to clear out the museum exhibits and turn the museum into a gallery. This was fantastic. The museum has gallery lighting and big, white walls. Lyndsie chose not to do that. It doesn’t affect where I hang my paintings, but it makes the paintings look like just another museum exhibit and people can’t get close to them to look at them. People LIKE to do that. It’s funny, but I don’t really care. I care enough to notice, but not enough to object. In fact, I don’t object. That old saw about “choosing your fights”? Well I understand it now. That’s not my fight. I know Lyndsie had to advocate with the county on behalf of local artists. I don’t know everything that happened in the last days of Louise other than it wasn’t pretty. I love Louise and I like Lyndsie, but most of all, I appreciate the museum. That is my “job” description. “Hi, my name is Martha and I support the museum.” One thing I would like to do in 2023 is find something to do with my paintings. I don’t know what that would be, but I think it might involve driving. Ha ha…

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2022/12/11/rdp-sunday-hang/

Meandering Blog Post about My Dilettante Life

In an effort to overcome Covid brain I’ve been doing languages on Duolingo, a free online language program. I don’t like it, but 1) it’s free 2) I have to concentrate. Multi-tasking is (as far as I can tell) the big challenge right now, something highlighted (why not high lit?) by having written the same thing five separate times as I was trying to label my paintings at the museum the other day. Someone was talking to me as I was trying to write — well, print. We won’t mention that I’d already written the labels correctly only moments before, but couldn’t find them (18 inches away from my hand).

I started with Spanish, my best foreign language. It was kind of fun to move ahead from where I’ve been for 50 years. Then, to challenge myself, I turned to Chinese. That was strange. Chinese ideograms were always easy for me to recognize, but not on Duolingo. I have no way to know if it’s my brain or the way the program has decided to “write” them. Also, the program presents Chinese the way it presents alphabet languages which is a little strange, too. But I honestly can’t tell if it’s strange or my brain is strange. And, since my Chinese is primarily directly out of daily life, the practice conversations seemed strange. But then, I never lived in a place where people speak Mandarin, so I don’t really know. Most of the ambient Chinese in my life was in Cantonese — which I don’t speak or understand well. I spoke Mandarin in Guangzhou, but it wasn’t until I visited Hangzhou that I had an actual conversation in it.

It’s funny but even thought mosquitoes were ubiquitous, I never learned to say “mosquito” in any Chinese dialect. I like the word best in Italian, “zanzara.” It sounds like a mosquito sounds. Italian is my second best foreign language but practicing THAT on Duolingo is incredibly noisoso.

I’m a dilettante in everything, the kind of person who walks around in the shallow part of a lake and imagines she’s an Olympic swimmer.

As I was writing Christmas cards, I was contacted by a woman I met at a conference — the SISSI Conference– Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery — really fun, very eclectic, conference. SISSI is long gone. We met what, ten or eleven years ago? She was giving a paper on Goliardic poetry which was mostly sung and written in Latin in the Middle Ages. I guess that’s pretty obscure but it’s right up my alley. When I saw the write up in the program I really wanted to meet her. She’s a classics teacher at Purdue. We had so much to talk about — it was as if we were old friends who hadn’t seen each other in a long time. She’s NOT a dilettante. She can speak and read several iterations of Greek and Latin. She has worked on many translation projects on manuscripts I dream of even just SEEING.

I was giving a paper on the Medieval Leper. I think we might have been the only two medieval topics in the whole show. Anyway, they scheduled us for the same session. I was sitting outside the session room, waiting for my session to begin, reviewing my stuff, and I saw her. She walked up to me, and asked if I were in the next session in that room. I said I was. Then I realized who she probably was, based on the program. I said, “Are you Liz Mercier? I really wanted to meet you!” She was so surprised and told me no one had ever really wanted to meet her. We struck up an instant friendship. I loved her paper and if I ever return to the story of Benedetto, Michele and Gaspar the donkey it’s all because of what I learned from her. Anyway, we both miss SISSI and our annual meet-ups and listening to each other expound on little-known and possibly irrelevant topics.

Anyway, I realized that Covid brain — which is either slowly receding or I’m getting used to it — is worse when I’m nervous, tired, or have been over-stimulated. Both were the case yesterday after all the events of Monday. I found myself struggling with many things that should not be a struggle.

Last night as I fought insomnia (thanks Covid brain), I was thinking that maybe the solution to the painting phobia might be small paintings like those I painted when I first got the natural pigments and didn’t know how they’d work or when I first started doing oil paintings again after not doing any during the forty years since high school.

That painting happened because my stepson and his wife gave me a canvas for Christmas. I loved that present, and the painting was surprisingly successful so I kept at it. Here it is.

A herd of red Angus cattle lived across the street from me and they liked to bunch up against the fence and watch me and the dogs. Their pasture was grass and oak trees with a few boulders interspersed. I liked them a lot.

I kept at it, doing small paintings because paint is expensive and surfaces are also expensive and we won’t talk about frames. The first oil painting I ever sold was one of the cows. It’s the featured photo, 5 x 7. My next door neighbors came to the little art and craft fair at the townhall and bought it, well my neighbor’s wife bought it for her husband for Christmas. I guess the moral of the story is just go try, dammit, Martha.

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WordPress’ daily prompt is “Do you have a favorite place you have visited? Where is it?” Here’s my answer. Zürich. It’s in Switzerland.

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2022/12/07/rdp-wednesday-mosquito/