Tumbling Down Rabbit Holes

 

With a to-do list, one could reasonably assume to accomplish at least half of them in a day. My average hovers around twelve percent.    Life intervenes.    I start to do something, get hijacked by random thoughts and find myself down a rabbit hole chasing endless tangents.    Yesterday's romp:    I have some commissions. Yay!    I really should go through the thousand images of a recent Hawaiian vacation.    My computer goes wacky. I cannot print images.    My iWatch dies.    I am hungry.    Suddenly, I must fix a painting that has been on display for years. I am embarrassed to have shown it. This is not good. The Geisha below, "Kyoto," is riddled with drawing errors. I wiped her out to begin again. But, oh, there are the commissions...    As the actress Bette Davis once said, "Life is too damned daily"    And, it is only January. kyoto geisha redo

TIME

 

Time is lost, saved, borrowed and often, a river.  Some times it's  stolen or of the essence.  I am finding it to be surprisingly elastic as well.

When I left the Torpedo Factory Art Center after seventeen years, I expected to do so much exploration in my home studio.  Working four days a week had limited what I could accomplish.  The remaining three days were given over to real life: groceries, appointments,  and obligations.  I longed to have hours to experiment, study and travel.

So, here I am, free as a bird. 

Possibilities are so vast, I am immobilized. 

Without the 4/3 dynamic, the days meld together.  Everything feels like a day off.   I no longer get up at 5 am to jumpstart the day. 

I am woozy with time.  I love the slow mornings.  But progress  soon drifts off to something else. There is no sense of accomplishment.

My daughter calls every Wednesday at 5:30.  She never forgets. Yesterday she didn't call.  I kept expecting the phone to ring.  Hours later I realized it was Friday, not Wednesday.

I am not complaining, just surprised.

A Visit to Studio Three

 If you have not been to the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria, Virginia, you have missed a great space.  There are 80 studios with working artists open to the public.  You can watch artists create, ask questions and perhaps find a piece you love.

This has been my perch for several years.  Studio 3 is flooded with natural light from two walls of huge windows.  My gallery is down below, featuring over thirty oil paintings.  

I would love you to visit!

Is there such a thing as too much paint?

   I am not a hoarder.  Well, not in the true sense of needing the County to intervene with shovels. But I do like my colors. When I started painting 20 years ago, I became a pastelist. Pastels are tools of intense pigment, which is a pure joy. Unfortunately, you can not mix pastels. You can stroke a glaze of one color over another but they remain distinct.  The only solution in my mind, was to own at least one of every color available.  So I do. (I worked in an art store.) 

  I  stopped painting with pastels because my teacher, Diane Tesler, said I could easily move back and forth between the two mediums.  Framing large pastels with non-relfective glass had become exorbitant.   So, I became an oil painter.  I had much difficulty using a paint brush. It felt so awkward to have something between me and the color.  With pastels, the hand is directly on the pigment.  I never was able to move between the mediums.  I had a sure touch with pastels, but now it is gone.  And I still struggle with the brush.

  One can paint beautifully with a limited palate.  Many do. There are many ways to make a color from other colors.  Yellow and black make amazing greens.  Lemon Yellow and a Mars Black makes a very different green than Cadmium Yellow and Ivory black.One color, between different manufacturers, can vary distinctly.   I remain seduced by colors.  

 Blue is my signature color. I have about 30 varieties of blues which can morph into dozens of other colors.

Maybe someone should call the County.

Time is not an arrow

Time is not an arrow, it is a blow to the senses. One minute you are a sentient being, and the next you cannot open a bag of cheese.  There is no strength in my hands or fingers.  I find myself, more and more, using my teeth. Soon they will be down to nubs. I will have to gum my food. 

I did not think 74 was that old, but apparently I have been mislead by advertisers.  It is old.  What irks me most is not the daily reminders of  imminent decay,  but the loss of word recall.  "Anomia is a form of aphasia in which the patient is unable to recall the names of everyday objects."  And wouldn't you know? They have made a board game of it.  In the game, you describe an object and the other players have to guess the word.  And that is more or less what conversations with me have become.

In middle age, a person's memory is reasonable. But as you age your  brain becomes dense, like a hoarder's house.  There are narrow pathways, but there is no way you can reach the broken aquarium under the cat in the Barbie dollhouse.

Gone, Baby, Gone

 

Before Sam, I had never had a dog argue with me. We never knew the source of his grievance.  Sometimes, I argued back, miming his outrage. 

Sam was adopted at two by  my son who treated him well.  Perhaps his first two years were horrific,  full of cats and scary city rats.  He was eight when we took over his care, including two knee replacements

With time the arguments subsided, but he never lost the urge to comment.  He always wanted something now, dammit.  He could be alone in a room and still he groused.

 He was aloof, but he and I cuddled when no one was looking. We were good to Sam.

 The car seemed to come out of nowhere.   Sam was hit and dragged.  I thought he was going to be okay as he was standing when I got to him.  But he wasn't.  The vet offered options.  It wasn't the cost, but likelihood of a painful life that made us pause. My son agreed via Trans-Pacific call to let Sam go.

The silence in our home is deafening.

Death by Root Beer

Once again, I have killed my laptop computer with spilled root beer.  The MacBook pro was seven years old, surely living on borrowed time.  I was determined to keep it going. Not out of sentiment, but because it ran Photoshop Elements #6.  My business depends on photos, for paintings and for sale.

I inadvertently upgraded to BigSur OS last year and discovered to my horror that it would not run my antiquated photoshop software.  In a panic, I purchased Photoshop Elements #20 and bought the 'for dummies' book.  I tried, I really did. Then I called Apple and reverted to the old OS.

My new computer uses the futuristic Photoshop Elements 2021.  Another app paid for, another 'for dummies' bought.   I have leapfrogged into the future and it is not pretty.  What was once so simple is now tortuous.

I considered repairing my old Mac. The technician quoted a minimum of $650.  Only the track pad fell victim to the root beer but it is of one piece with the battery and the keyboard.  Clever apple.

A few days after its death, I turned on the old laptop.  The track pad did not work, but I reasoned maybe a new magic mouse would.  I was right!  Some files are missing or corrupted, but I can process and  print images.

It will take another pandemic for me to untangle the future.