July 12, 2005

Pestiferous People and Progress

On a totally non-artistic note, let me just say that today was not fun. I’ve spent the last couple of days dealing with a situation that never should have come up, and just kept getting to be more and more a pain in my butt as time went by. Finally, things came to a head and the woman who was the cause of this pain and suffering gave me the classic, “Well, I do have to take a measure of responsibility for all this.”

A measure? No, honey…you need to take ALL of the responsibility for all of this. You screwed up to begin with, and just kept screwing up all the way along, dragging me along with you.

But, the silver lining is that she isn’t a regular in my life, so I hope to be able to avoid her from now on. God knows I’ve now been warned.

Okay, now I’ve vented. On to the art stuff.

Item number one on my Stuff To Paint By The End Of The Year list, a piece for next month’s “Poppies” show on EBSQart.com, is underway. Not very far underway, but it has pulled away from the dock. I’ve got my canvas prepped and a bunch of reference photos lined up. I’m still trying to decide between acrylic and oil, but I’m leaning toward a gradual buildup of very thin acrylic washes. Actually, watercolor isn’t totally out of the running, either. But acrylic is where I’ll start.

In going over The List, I noticed a couple of potential problems. Maybe not problems, exactly, but things that might do with a re-think. For instance, the November show I’m looking at is called, “Classic Mythology in Contemporary Fantasy Art”, but it has a little note saying, “this is a media/genre specific show”. And then that’s it…no more information beyond that. Now, my assumption is that in this case we’re talking about a genre-specific show, rather than a media-specific show, but I could be wrong. And there’s nothing on EBSQ to fill me in. So, I will just plug along and do a nice painting and put it up in the show and if they don’t like it, they can ask me to take it down.

I’m hoping for an afternoon thunderstorm to drop the temperature so that I can spend some time painting tonight without cooking. That south-facing wall/window combo in the studio is a killer in the summer.