Some wonderful paintings and more writing than usual

We were at Joyce's on her patio. The weather was so nice.

Here's Blanca's painting. Great start.

And Joyce finished the cactus from Susan's several weeks ago. I love the way she painted the shapes in the plant using her saturated and neutral greens.  

And the pot is handled very successfully too.

And her glaze painting of the basil plant is finished. Beautiful!

Dolly brought her painting from Laura's. The background wasn't exactly right so Dolly reworked it at home and got out her palatte knife. She also changed the color of the vase from the green that is was to a nice complimentary red.

 I wanted to write a little about was this one. This is a work that Dolly did in another class...  a long time ago. She always liked the background but was never happy with the rocks or the foreground. She brought it to class to fix but didn't have any reference material and got pretty frustrated trying to make new interesting rocks. Can you hear Dolly say, " I don't know what I'm doing." ( I can )

Towards the end of class things weren't going so well and I just didn't have any feed back other than to just go ahead and paint. It couldn't get any worse. So I'm not sure what happened but she just went to work on the right side of the painting, figuring she had nothing to lose. Then there was a breakthrough. The rocks on the left aren't done but look at how the ones on the right read as foreground.

Dolly's work with this painting is what painters have to deal with. It's hardly ever easy to get a gorgeous painting and this brings to mind some ideas from my late teacher Linda Day. I mentioned in class that a wonderful teacher of mine from graduate school died suddenly of cancer. At her memorial service they passed out some of her writing about being an artist. Here is something that really 

moved me.

Linda's Manifesto

• 1. Be a fool for love. Be a fool for art. Embarrass yourself in the studio on a daily basis.
• 2. Build it up. Break it down. Find it. Lose it. Find it again.
• 3. Remind yourself daily that real freedom exists in the studio- and probably no where else.
• 4. Begin and end the day in silence with your work. 

See you tomorrow!