bad technology day

grrrr.... ipod is inexplicably frozen, and i managed to inadvertently delete all the photos on my camera.... if anyone has any suggestions re: unfreezing the ipod, i suspect i will be desperate in a few days, so any and all remote technological assistance welcome. perhaps it just doesn't like the indigo girls. hopefully the bad technojuju will not affect the etch-a-sketch.

we did gesture drawing with blocked outlines this morning; less tedious than just gesture drawings because there is only one right answer with the blocked outlines, and you have to sit there until every single angle agrees when you check it against every other angle. it definitely feels like there is a point to doing it over and over again until you can get it right the first time. it's like when the karate kid first figures out that there's a reason for the wax on wax off. any day now i will be the surprise victor at the national high school karate finals competition; just watch this space. Teacher's lecture today was an exercise in self-improvement in a different way: he managed to stay a bit more concrete, but every few minutes there would be a mispronunciation ('...the artist paul klee...', pronounced klee instead of clay), a misdefinition ('relative pitch in music, for example, is when i play you a note, and you sing that same note back to me') or a wrong word ('the sense of where your body is in space is called 'propiocentrism' eek no it's not, it's proprioception). i have to remind myself, the contest is not about who knows more, it's about who can restrain themselves from being an obnoxious smart-arse. clearly not me, because i am blogging about it now. but i promise, not a peep out of me during class.

during lunch i worked on king charles (isn't that a kind of spaniel? i'm thinking small and yappy with long floppy ears) and then back in the afternoon for poster study. M has promised that after this week (different poster study every afternoon), we will do one more week of something called rounding exercises, and then we will get to start our first Real Painting (a two week pose). She said this during coffee break when we were all standing around yackering and there was a sudden dead silence, and everyone felt really nervous, like, wow, A Real Painting. that's heavy stuff, man.

ce soir i went for a runnyrun out a different way than i have ever gone before, uncharted territory, off the map. i didn't see any sea monsters, but there were some tres joli sunflower fields in full bloom. it pissed with rain this morning, cold and windy, all the shutters rattling (the stools in the studio all creak and squeak, so when the wind gets going, it feels like you are in an old wooden ship in a storm at sea) but then was inexplicably hot this afternoon when i was running. i have given up trying to dress for the weather; polartek and thermal underwear with eensy weensy tank tops and skirts is the only sensible solution.

portrait night this evening - i have done both portrait sessions in pencil, because it's what was on the supplies list, so i figured i should start getting used to it, but have come to the conclusion that i DO NOT LIKE drawring in pencil because the grey is BORING. i like my lovely sanguine, all juicy warm red sexy smudgy that you can fingerpaint with, practically, and next tuesday supplies list be damned! i am going to go for it. wow, that just goes to show the isolation tankitude of my existence here, when using something out of my secret illicit stash of unofficial art supplies counts as a thrill to be anticipated a week in advance. i'd head out to le calimero (the little pub) and have a glass of wine, but the overstimulation might be damaging, so instead i'll head to bed, read about alice munro's depressing childhood in ontario, and contemplate the appointment i have with the french dentist for a cleaning in two weeks' time instead (flying to france to take advantage of socialized medicine might sadly be more cost effective and timely than trying to get dental care in the US; apparently they charge a flat rate of 30 euros for cleaning plus x-rays if you don't have a french health card, and teacher said they apologize profusely for even charging that much... sounds like a deal to me, man.)

love to all and to all a good night...