Distractions

6/3/2018

I've filled recent weeks with distractions and chores:
1. Drawing Katrina's long-gone 4-H Breeding Project ewe, Baba, with a couple of her woolie cronies, for donation to a fund-raising auction at the National Columbia Show and Sale upcoming in mid-June.

2. Painting Curls, first revising my previously-done effort and then attempting a second version, trying in both to nail his amazing fleece, his classic profile, and his killer machismo.

3. Painting a yearling Columbia buck on gesso-covered paper, a first for me, and also intended for donation to fund-raising at the National Columbia Show and Sale.

4. Cutting mats and shrink wrapping all the above, plus my early-May workshop painting done on Yupo paper, another first for me.

5. Picking and dealing with vats of wild asparagus--blanching and freezing an ample supply for future use, and roasting, steaming, and souping to creamy perfection the on-going bounty of canal-bank gleanings for immediate gourmet dining, meal after evening meal.

6. Reading--a fabulous fiction by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, as well as an essential non-fiction for oldies and kids who might become their caregivers, Being Mortal, by physician Atul Gawande.

7. Gardening. Our previously decimated inventory of tomatoes and peppers, now augmented by greenhouse additions, is blossoming, and everything else has germinated.

8. Gopher trapping, with requisite twice-a-day checks.

9. The usual AM and PM chores--turning sheep out to graze, bringing them back in for the night, filling troughs . . . plus moving the cows to pasture and hauling the bull to market (good riddance to that fence-crawling peckerhead).

Despite essential routines and temporary distractions, days continue to feel flat and empty without Weed.

3 Comments

Toneybeth Clark

6/4/2018 09:26:14 am

As usual, I am in awe of your productivity and am amazed that you can fit in the creation of the wonderful sheep portraits and stream scene into your already busy days. I had to look up yupo paper. Since it is waterproof, I assume you use another medium besides watercolors on it, acrylics? oils?

Margaret Eller

6/4/2018 11:30:46 am

Toneybeth

I seek out escape activities, ones that make me sweat and ones that transport me out of my thoughts and into other frames. That said, I think you would love the potato peel pie book I just finished. It is a series of letters written during WWII and reminded me of the volumes of letters that my mom wrote and received back in the day--multiples every day. The characters in the book are priceless. At first I had to keep going back and reviewing previous letters in order to remind myself of who was whom, but all of the characters (all letter-writers) came into sharp focus in short order.

As for the Yupo: lots of folks love it; I might give it a second go if someone gives me a sheet (as happened at the workshop). I would not be inclined to pay for any. In your youth, were you ever given the chance to play w/mercury? I was. (In hindsight, that exposure may explain my caustic tongue and poisonous sarcasm. Surely, you, too, are a victim!) Anyway, Yupo is like a drop of mercury. Drop a blob of juicy pigment onto the surface and it sits there, try to drag it into a shape or cover an extended surface with it, and it evades all efforts and reforms into its original blob. If you wet an area ahead of time and drop pigment into it, the pigment spreads, but you dare not try to overlay another pigment atop it, because the first layer lifts. Very frustrating; at least very unlike real watercolor paper. And yes, watercolors are the pigment of choice, as Yupo, at least the piece I was given, is not stout enough or stiff enough for acrylics or oils. Perhaps gauche or ink would be okay.

My painting ended up with an odd missed spot--shaped like an elongate kangaroo leaping over the shed--in the sky. (I suspect it was a spot that I had touched previously. Fingerprints, even my dry crunchy ones, add oil that acts like a resist.) It took ages and more finesse than I care to devote in order to get that shape filled with cobalt blue in a way that did not leap out of the rest of the cobalt blue sky. The one advantage of the stuff is the fact that a mere brush stroke is enough to lift the pigment off any previously painted surface. Don't like the shape of a snow drift? Remove and reconfigure the offending shape w/a mere stroke. Need some pale grassy blades to suggest one clump in front of another? Singular swipes w/a narrow paintbrush will do it. In my mind, that spectacularly easy lifting does not make up for the boat loads of frustrating features.

6/4/2018 11:25:22 pm

I love The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society book. I was given it by my cousin when it first came out as someone had given it to her because her name is Sidney and one of the main protagonists is named Sidney (though male). As you know, I still prefer pen and paper letters and so was entranced by the letters in the book (while querying if the letters could have made it back and forth to London and Guernsey in the times indicated).

Oh, God, yes, my older brother and I DID have a large jar of mercury to play with. This possibly explains a lot about our subsequent development (or lack thereof). I can't imagine using the Yupo paper with watercolors. I could completely picture how it would react and would not have persevered (unless it was as fun as chasing mercury droplets across a surface which you indicated it was not (fun)). I do like the stream scene though and it does have a fluidity appropriate for the scene.

Distractions

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