This week has been pretty momentous for our young country with two big supreme court rulings causing a stir.  I have very good friends and family members for whom they are monumental. 

My week, personally, has been slow.  I developed a neck cramp that brought my productivity to a dead halt.  You never realize how important those muscles that hold up the most important organ in your body are until they stop working or cause you so much pain you just can't function.  I've done the very minimum possible this whole workweek with agony.  Even after two trips to the massage therapist, lots of anti-inflammatories, and heat and ice packs, the spasms continue.

I managed to make progress on only one painting.   So I will share it with you from its inception (which was more than a year ago) to its current incarnation.  This painting, which will become a set and possibly another series, follows the musical theme paintings I've done before.  I usually do them with treble and bass clefs covered in vines and berries and flowers.  This time, I thought I'd add a little more sinister but beautiful nature to the design.  The snake design came first.  I sketched this some time ago.  It was sort of a snake/serpent/dragon concept.

Here is what the first sketch looked like:

I'm a big fan of snakes.  I do prefer the nonlethal kind in person.  However, the innumerable variety of snakes around the world, in fact, just in Louisiana, is mind-boggling.  One of the most dangerous and also one of the most beautiful snakes here is the copperhead.  I decided that would be my first one.  This is what it started out looking like, wrapped around the treble clef.  Obviously, I had a long way to go at this point.

My tiny bit of progress this week is shown below.  I still have a lot of work to do, and I may or may not get done with it today, but here it is.

My sketch books are full of future ideas.  I hope you enjoy seeing these progressions as much as I enjoy sharing them.

AM

Since my last post, I managed to find some time to work in my first medium, watercolors.  It was good to get back to something that, some 30+ years since my first lesson, still felt so natural to me.  I have done a few watercolor paintings here and there over the years, but not seriously as an artist until now.  I enjoyed the fluidity of the paint, the freedom to pull my brush across the paper, the softness of the color--all things I don't feel with acrylic paint.

I felt as though Mr. Looney's spirit was guiding me, reminding me about method.  I could see in my mind his wrinkled, bent fingers selecting, opening, and squeezing the paint tubes into the pallet, telling me what colors would work best for the painting of a duck flying over a foggy bayou early in the morning.  I'm painting other things now, of course, but I will never forget that first session when he led me to believe I showed true talent and promise. 

It took me a long time to believe it, but better late than never.

While I had every intention of doing the Lakeside show this weekend and had my spot reserved, I had to step back and take inventory of my time.  When I did so, I realized I had already far surpassed the limit of things one person is able to do at one time.  I have always had a problem with spreading my time too thin, saying yes a little too often, and it is time for me stop and reevaluate my priorities.  Time is money, as they say, and I'm just about broke. 
 
There are still many talented artists, some more talented and experienced than I, who will be selling at this show, so I still encourage readers to attend and browse. 
 
More to come...