hola hola -
aujourd'hui we went on a field trip! so much fun. we drew in the morning, painted in the afternoon blah blah blah, and then we left class early to go on an expedition to the nearby village of les cerqueux which i am definitely spelling incorrectly, but never mind. les cerqueux is where ted seth jacobs lives and runs a school of sorts six months of the year (the same handful of students has apparently been coming for the last, oh, fifteen years....) and spends the rest of the year decorating his house and seducing his models, which isn't a bad way to be spending your time, especially if you are in your eighties. his house is aMAZing - it's a rickety old eighteenth century rabbit warren, and literally every surface is painted with trompe-l'oeil and murals. i will post pics when i can, but for instance the front entranceway is a french garden in different seasons of the year, with frolicking nymphets representing each season (definite predilection for naked girls throughout the house. some in more psychologically alarming attitudes than others); up the stairs you get a paris street scene one way and the champs-elysees with the arc de triomphe looking the other way; every nook and cranny has a faux cupboard painted into it with beautiful little objets (china, old dolls, old letters, books) painted in. etc. and the ceilings and doors are painted in faux carved marble and wood, floors are painted in exotic parquet or tile (except for the front entrance which has an ornate painted-in fish pond with carpies in it!). crazy crazy. but so cool. it made me want to go home and paint my house, except it would mean that you could never move. i wasn't as crazy about some of his actual paintings - apart from a few exquisite portraits and drawings, half his stuff is hyper-realist still lifes of buddhism-related objects, and the other half was oil-pastels of mythological/fairy tale type women with weird stretched bodies, alarmingly bushy and/or red pubic hair, and over-the-top makeup jobs (blue eyeshadow, bright pink lipstick), getting either murdered, abducted, raped, or otherwise in harm's way. he has apparently been married six or seven times. i am guessing there is some pathology somewhere in there... :)
then to an open house of a sculptor who lives nearby - an american lady, martine something, who according to her brochure founded the 'passionist' movement in art. this means bronze casts of stretched out fairy-tale type nymphets (what is with randy old male and morbidly obese female artists that they are so captivated by adolescent girls? sorry, that was snarky, but _really_). not my tasse de the at ALL but always fun to have a nose around other people's houses :) then home again home again to dinner: artichokes with home-made mayonnaise, salami, and rice pudding. i think all the major food groups are in there somewhere. T wandered over to eat her dinner with me and we talked about whether doctors and artists see bodies in the same way, and the fact that any discussion/jokes/anything about sex while the model is naked become completely taboo without anyone ever having to say it explicitly.
i did not get a pip of work done on my master copy all day today; no gold star for me. but i did go for an extra long run this morning, as well as morning yoga, so i can have a gold star for that. tomorrow i am sure i will get TRUCKLOADS of painting done. here is a nerdy experiment that if i had a scale i would totally do: figure out by weighing my canvases before and after i paint what percentage of each tube of paint ends up on the canvas, versus down the sink or thrown away. i would be willing to bet it is less than 1/3 ends up on the canvas. possibly a lot less. i am messy (although i had a little OCD moment the other day, when i realized that i was about to run out of all but three colours on my palette - anyone else would have just sloshed more paint onto the palette, but i, i saw an opportunity for a thorough palette cleaning and rearrangement of my colours into perfect rainbow order, where they had been all higgledy piggledy before because i was just putting blobs of colour out as i needed them. SO satisfying).
currently reading 'feast of love', by charles baxter. have not yet decided whether i like it. but he is a good writer, i think.
time for me to join the narcoleptics of the world,
love to all,
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Isn't solvent a substantial part of what's in the tube? If yes, you'd have to determine the quantity of "dry matter" in a tube. E.g., by emptying one tube onto a single canvas (an application of which could be making a painting of tomatoes and Daisy's finger after trying to cut them -- not much else needed beyond bloody red).
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