Monday morning - think I'll annotate my posts

Hey hey. Monday, it is still morning; I'm making breakfast - my usual time, which I would like to change.

I have been moving forward on my website: I picked a bunch of slides of my work that I want to put on the site, and found a scanning service for high end scans, in San Francisco, and (just for this first time) drove into SF to take in the slides, and again, a week & a half later (I wasn't in a hurry) to pick slides and scans up. The scans look very good; I might want to get larger ones for some of these if I want to have prints made, but for now they're great.

The next thing to do was to knock out the white paper background (which came out pale grey in the photographing of it) of the charcoal drawing I want to have on my Entry page. Now I'm thinking, since I actually want the actual drawing surrounded by the entry page color - not white - that maybe I should have just painted in a color, any color, which would make it easy to select the color and change it, rather than Erasing to white. On the other hand, I think I want little details from this spread around the website, which I will do as square/rectangular bits with white background, so I guess doing the erasing may have been a good way to start after all. It was a long and picky process, rather like cutting away linoleum from words and lines and fur details. It also reminded me of mowing a lawn, sometimes - sweeping away the large areas, even with a larger eraser...

Anyway, that first step on that drawing is done.

Looking at my last post here, I'm thinking I'd like to annotate some of these posts, define or explain some of the terms or names... In case anyone but me ever reads it...

Well, I think that's enough for this morning. Hey hey again...

Thoughts from Monday

So. Since two weeks ago Monday, I have been doing JoKata in the mornings, and that's been good. Kate had me "get back on the horse" - fast painting; I was scared of it. In my mind I said, but I hit my head last time - really hard. It was traumatic. So that was on Wednesday, the 18th, and after some resistance I said I'd do it that day - 1 hour. But I didn't do it Wednesday, but I DID do it the next day, Thursday. I did a fast painting, from a photo of Molly, including tracing, enlarging, transfering, and painting. At one point I looked at my timer, thinking, isn't my time up yet? (Or was that the next time I painted?) I liked the results, and... but... I felt kinda flat, unable to celebrate actually doing it, unable to enjoy what I'd done. Just flat.

Next day when I talked to Shrimpy, she said, You PAINTED? You DID it? How about celebrating that? And I started crying.

I still don't feel like I know what that's all about; and maybe I never will. When I went to Kate's last week, for S Coaching, she had me do a very fast painting, about 15 minutes. Everything I had to work with was a bit crude: paper: the inside of some used wrapping paper; pencil: one common yellow #2 pencil, not very sharp; brushes: a few various ones of quite moderate quality; color: a bottle of writing ink, blue or blue-black; and my reference: a dog-eared photo of a - BLACK - puppy, and it looked like it was actually a worn and dog-eared XEROX of a photo. Little detail, hard to make out. But as I was working, I realized it was probably Kiwi, and I was right.

As crude as that was, there were things I liked a lot about it. With only one color, no water for diluting. Not much subtlety. And yet Kate and I both felt I had captured Kiwi. After that, and some energy work, I felt kind of calm. Sometimes it's hard to tell calm and numb apart. And while I'm scared of the excitement and the trauma, when they're not there I also miss them...

On Kate's assignment I did one more 15-minute painting, last Thursday. (But I actually set the timer for 20 minutes, and also, because Shipply called and I was working on it part of the time we were talking, I figured it was really 25 minutes.) This time I did a direct sketch and painting in my big spiral sketchbook, of Starr. Black, again - this year's Raffle winner. And when I got to her eye, when I was going back into it, edging it with black, I got suddenly excited, for a moment at least, and thought, that's IT!

I am thinking I'd like to give Ruth her set of the photos I took, and consult with her about which one she'd like me to use.

That's it for today...

Hmmm

I'm a featured reader in a poetry reading this Wednesday evening. I've been going through my poems, reading them aloud and timing them, thinking about which ones I want to read, how they fit together, what kind of narrative thread they might follow.

Meanwhile, our oak trees have large areas of leaves turned yellow, the weather's been cool and clear, and this evening we have a brilliant sunset, as the changing light is caught by some layers of clouds. Usually our air is SO clear that we don't have a very interesting sunset, so this is a rare sight. Paul heard a woodpecker; it sounded like a big one to him.

I don't know what else to say now. I think I ought to say more... but I'm not.

Putting off having dinner

Putting off having dinner, not making salad... I painted today, and felt unbearably disappointed afterwards. That's all I will say about that.

Well, hey hey anyway... Onward.

Tuesday evening

We saw a deer the other evening - a very young buck, getting his first set of antlers, I think, standing just beyond our truck. Chief barked at him - he seems to think the deer are going to attack us; I watched from inside for a minute, then went out on the porch, and carefully but openly walked to the side closest to the buck, and watched him. A couple of times his head went high, on guard, but then he relaxed and looked around behind him, downslope, and finally turned and went over the edge and back down, slabby sided and high heeled.

Last night there were clouds flung across the sky, backlit by the moon. I love that, but most of all (or at least especially) I love the green of the oak leaves pouring out in front of me, when the sun's behind them. Green is a vitamin for the eyes...

Now it's about time to go to bed. I'm not the early retirer and early riser I want to be, not right now.

Do I need to have a post for this to show up?

Hey, hey. Do I need to have a post for my URL to be found? Just wondering... Hoping...