hullo world! how are you? doing bueno, i hope.
so today as it turns out is the chinese harvest moon festival (corresponding, whether on purpose or just a felicitous accident, with a full moon last night); studio E celebrated with a blackberry tart made by the two chinese-speakers in the class (L and me; i have now expanded my chinese vocabulary to include 'yes' and 'no'). it was not your average blackberry tart - the creme patissiere in particular had an original je ne sais quoi to it (actually i do sais quoi - as we didn't have corn starch to thicken it, i used the flour we had plus a pinch of polenta) - but luckily L put a little card next to it introducing it as 'mystery pie' which guaranteed that people went into the eating experience with an, er, open mind. i am pleased to report rave reviews all round, except from M (the frenchwoman) who very sensibly doesn't eat anything that anyone brings to class, probably out of total horror at the things americans are willing to put in their mouths and actually knows what proper creme patissiere is supposed to look/taste like. (she looked particularly scandalized at krystle's popcorn with cinnamon and cocoa powder. everyone else chowed down).
drawing in the morning was good; we are doing more blocking-in, with contour drawings, and although i am consistently wanting to cheat by holding up my pencil to check angles etc it is a very good exercise to do. (checking angles by holding up calipers/straight edges is absolutely forbidden, off limits, verboten, interdit, i think mainly because ingres once said something snotty about people who do that, and cleanliness is next to godliness is next to ingres-liness at studio E). it is really amazing how you can think you have everything right, you check all your angles, all your relative lengths, yup yup yup everything checks out, and then you find one thing which is completely wonky (in my case invariably something leg-related - why is that?) that you can't change without going back and readjusting the entire drawing that you had thought was right but obviously wasn't.
painting in the afternoon - day 2 of rounding studies which are SO HARD. i just don't get how the people who are really good at them get their colours to smoosh together and look like a completely smooth surface. coincidentally (or perhaps not), those are the people who have done the course before (except for M) - i will be interested to see how much i improve over the next ten weeks, and whether the skill-to-prior-terms-here relationship is causal or casual. hm. on verra.
anyway. on to the things i am wildly successful at: eating cheese (fromage of the day a viciously pungent pont l'eveque. mmmm), timely completion of copies of pictures of long-dead french kings (hooray! have to decide what i am going to do next), and punctual and reliable attendance at pilates this morning and hula class tonight. my powerhouse is feeling the attention, i will just say that. i have done more sit-up type exercises in the last two days than in the rest of my life combined. the thing about pilates is that the sit-ups are all _disguised_ very cleverly as something else. 'let's do scissorlegs!' says the perky lady, or "you're gonna LOVE this one - i call it the seal!" and then she has you do sit-ups again. hey, by the time i come home i might actually be able to _do_ a sit-up.
time for book and bed - fingers crossed no insomnia tonight...
love to all!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment