Departure from Normal

It's been a good weekend - without travel in a Van loaded with paintings, prints, canopy parts, suitcases, and all the sundries that go with being on the road for art festivals. Instead, it was filled with projects of all kinds that needed attention. The palette and the easel being the main one, since I have a show coming up next weekend in Savannah, GA.

To celebrate a departure from the normal schedule, the canvas wanted to have something besides sheep on it today. Having spent some time in my favorite artist community reading about Vermillion oil paint and it's various qualities, shades and purposes, I wanted to see what shades of red I have in my studio canister. Though I have a whole drawer full, I wound up using "only" 14 different shades...quite a departure from my normal palette of about 9 colors from around the color wheel.

To keep from having to clean the palette all the time, I've discovered a maaaahvelous product: Glad press 'n' seal. Whenever I'm done painting, I just toss it. Actually, I've thought of just selling it along with the painting I used it for. Is that a good idea? Not sure what it would be good for, other than just an extra memento to include with the painting. Then again, it might be kind of cool to have it as part of the painting's history. What do you think?

And since trying different things for a change is good for you, the sheep got to be ignored today - instead I wanted to create a loose painting with all those different shades of red. Without a concept of what I was going to paint, I just dipped in and started splotching some of each shade on the canvas in a random pattern - which eventually turned into this:

Who knows, tomorrow inspiration might come from a different angle, and a sheep will pop up in there somewhere - or maybe it will be worked over with some different shades of green and gifted to my Mom who had a birthday yesterday.
There seems to something about the color red in paintings that digital cameras cannot pick up - maybe some adjustment lever I haven't discovered yet...in real life, it's quite a bit more vibrant than you see here, with quite a bit more variations. Ah, well...some things in life just have to be imperfect...

Another project I had been putting off is getting back to spinning - I've been neglecting that a bit this past week. Today's wool is from Philly - our cotswold sheep. VERY fluffy stuff, but great fun to work with. Oh, and here is a picture of my little friend, the spinning wheel - it was a gift from my mother, who bought it a few years ago from a lady in Germany. No clue about it's age, maker or origin - but maybe there is a specialist out there that could give me some info about it...I would love to know more about it. The chair is a very old kind of wobbly thing, I found in 1995 in Denver, Colorado at a yard sale (paid all of $4 for it...) - it's made with wooden pegs, and seems to have been refinished by adding a wooden seat to it where it used to be the woven seat kind of thing.

There also was a bit of dyeing some wool - I'm working on a knitted patchwork throw of sorts, and of course ran out of the colored wool in the middle of one of them...so, a bit of wool, water,blue koolaid, and microwave later, I'm again ready to finish that square and move on to other things.

This is also the day that Peter the Art Pimp comes back home from a short trip to Germany - nice when they leave, nice when they come back.

So - a weekend of Departure always makes Arrival somewhere else possible. Which is a good thing.