All revved up and cranking them out!

Once again, each day seems only marginally productive, but then I turn around and look at the last month's worth of paintings and there's a lot there. Now for places to show them!

I'm doing something else different now, too.
When I am having trouble finding an image to paint, I turn and take a look at my older paintings. Sometimes I want to revisit a particular scene, sometimes an older painting spurs me to try something very different.
One of these (actually several of these) are from old and very old family photos (you'll know who you are!).

Cat Perch

House on the Strand

Morning Paper (reworked)

Universal Language

Magic Em

The Reading Lesson

Absent, but with an excuse!

This past week has been lacking in the painting department, but I do have a very good excuse!

I have been helping my brother expand his fishpond. The fish have been targeted recently by a beautiful but deadly great blue heron. So we decided to expand the pond and incorporate lots of underwater ledges and hiding places to give the fish a fighting chance.

Jim's estimate of fish population before this pond excavation began was about 40 - 50 fish.

When we got down to transferring them into the wading pools in order to reline the expanded pond, we found no more than 10, with only two larger than 5" long!

That heron is a superbly engineered fishing entity!

So, days later, and many hours of back-breaking work, and all that remains is cosmetic - for next week.

Life and Death (and the hereafter of paintings)

So, the scythe of destruction has swept through my paintings and has transformed them into new, reincarnated canvases, with heavier textures and more complex histories.

Here are two, with old and new versions.

Old

New

Old

New

Danger Will Robinson, Danger!

OK, I am giving notice: I am in a genuinely dangerous mood. Paintings beware!
I am restless and bored with the same old, same old. This means it's time to recycle canvases.

New works:

Some in imminent danger:

Crazy spring

Love the fact that more people have stepped forward to help with the Open Studios.
But with each succeeding year, I get more burnt out. Would really like to be able to hand over the chairmanship of this event to someone else.

And again, apologies...

It's not such an easy matter to remember to update this blog.

Also, when I don't have any new paintings to show, it's kind of defeating the purpose to make any entry. After all, how many ways can you say "Rats, nothing happening"?

But then I turn around and the couple of weeks (OK maybe a bit more than that) has resulted in quite a few fun paintings. Of course, they have nothing whatsoever to do with the last entry and that so-called epiphany of understanding and conceptual meaning (blah, blah, blah...).

No, as usual, these are all about what looks right to me at the moment - nothing more. Hope they look right to you, too...

(P.S. Open Studios at The Jackson Art Center in DC on April 28th. See you then.)

 Golden Fields 30 x 40

Side by Side 36 x 48

 Full Blooms 30 x 48

Geraniums 2013 IV 30 x 40

Edges 30 x 40

Home Sweet Home I 30 x 48

Home Sweet Home II 30 x 48

Home Sweet Home III 40 x 40

See you sooner than last time, I hope!

Thoughts

Parkinson's law is alive and well. As I recall, its main message could be boiled down to: "paper begets paper".
How true this remains.

In this great nation, whose purpose is to give individuals the wherewithal and space to pursue their dreams (thereby enriching the entire human race), the same tendency holds sway - every perceived wrong must be addressed with a law or legal ruling that will apply in all circumstances that remotely approximate the original wrong.
We allow for no common sense approaches to judging individual events. And yet, every event is individual.

Consider the homeowner's association that went heavily into debt fighting to impose ludicrously minor rules. Consider the homeowners who brought that association to its knees by being unwilling to mediate their differences.
All have lost. The association must sell what was the community's central green space in order to pay its legal fees. The homeowners - not only the litigants - will lose their open space. I expect their community spirit is already destroyed.

Consider our larger community. We debate and argue and battle ideas to death. Then we vote. The vote should bring some sense of accomplishment or compromise. At least we are supposed to honor the vote.

So what the _______________ is going on now?