Monthly Archives: April 2010

This was Graham’s day to go off and visit his mother, do shopping, fix small things… you know the routine.  While in the market he picked up a colourful sow-grow-gather bucket of jalapeno chillies for me.  Leastways, he says it was for me.  I said thank you nicely and told him I’d water them but he’d have to sow and gather them.

Then, opening a small parcel that’d arrived while he was out, he handed me a genuine Disney Mickey Mouse lamp of some age.  I said thank you for that, with enthusiasm.  A shade for it will be a challenge but I’m sure I can come up with a template by watching Mickey Mouse cartoons.

And, finally, I picked up my sketchbook, took my pen in hand, and… froze.  I know I have to do it.  I know I have to draw every day.  But starting, well, that’s the hard bit.  I shall get over it.

I think I’m just about finished scanning through page after page of on-line painters’ pictures, clicking on links that sound interesting or on thumbnails that promise delight.  Now it’s time to scan through my head, smelling the strange brittle aroma of stacks of paper pages from The Artist and other long defunct or changed out of all recognition publications.  Today’s art journals and magazines don’t seem to smell the same.  And they certainly don’t look the same.

Who can ever forget the smell of scrubbed wooden studio furniture in art school class rooms?  I wonder if they still smell the same?  A couple of years back, in a venture brought to a premature end by a house move, I was greatly tempted to inveigle myself into the back row of a good art school.  Glad I didn’t now. I have several art schools and an abundance of class rooms in my head.

And, heaven help me, a handful of lecturers and teachers, all trapped in my personal time trap, all vibrant and smelling of tobacco and beer, and all of them ready to repeat the lessons they gave me so long ago.  Most if not all of them will be dead by now.  I hope their dust doesn’t mind being stirred up as my memory sparks them back to a brief and probably unsatisfactory life.  It is, of course, an immortality of a kind.

I spent much of the day surfing on the subject of pochade boxes–small, complete oil painting boxes with a canvas board ‘easel’ in the lid, and with site after site of painters’ sites, most of them of the plein air kind.

I’ve been fascinated with pochade boxes on and off since my early days at art school, studying Turner’s and Constable’s sketches.  Then I got caught up with 1950′s British expressionism along with the delight in the work and life of the French Impressionists.  Finally, in 1960-63, during my RAF service, I settled down on an Utrillo-based large canvas approach to painting.  Small paintings were for wusses, according to the thinking back then.

I still sort of think that way.  Big is beautiful.  “Be bold!” I was taught, and that’s still with me.

Physically, though, I don’t think I can handle big canvasses, and certainly can’t manage to paint for long periods standing at an easel.  I need a comfortable seat.

So, I’m still thinking about it.  It’ll be oils, that much is certain.  And landscape, most probably.  Other than that, I need a couple of consultations with my pillow before I set out on a new painterly period.

I’m not anxious at this stage of my life to embark on a false start. I feel I should eschew false starts.

Oh.  Yes.  I’ve started off on Twitter again.  Latest twitters in the side bar.  Next extension is likely to be back to Flickr, with ‘latest pictures’ in the side bar.

A day of several seasons.  Mists, grey skies, sunshine and blue skies, and then grey skies once more.  At least it held off from raining and, now that evening is here, the cloud has rolled back and the sky is blue once more.  Another mild frost tonight, I suspect.

The trees are beginning to green up properly at last, and apple blossom has appeared as if by magic.

Our quince tree has been blooming steadily for a couple of weeks now, and continues to do so even as its leaves break through.  The bumblebees love it and drone heavily over the flowers from dawn until dusk.  I like bumblebees.  They work as hard as I would wish to.

Quince blossom

I have three sets of paints out just now:  watercolour, acrylic and oil.  Trying to decide which I shall put into use when I decide what and how I want to paint in the coming season.

Deliberations, deliberations.  Thinking about it seems harder work than actually doing it.

To the town dump recycling centre, with garage crappie, including the last of the horrid green carpet, and then to Sainsbury’s, for a week’s provisions.

Lunch was cheese and olive bread, with a small portion of strawberry cheesecake to follow, washed down with re-heated coffee, and then I hit the sack, to continue the sequence of strange, distorted dreams that’ve been bothering me for two or three days.

That’s the only problem with an afternoon nap.  It doubles the dreaming.

At six this evening, Graham came along to coax me, cautiously, into wakefulness.

And now, clutching a glass of a rather splendid sauvignon blanc from New Zealand, I’m torturing myself with Schubert, waiting for the really sad bit of the C Major string quintet–music suitable for a drama queen’s deathbed scene.  When it gets there and my tears have welled up I shall blow my nose and go cook dinner.