still sore from yoga - 2.5 days and counting...

allo allo (don't i sound, like, totally french? yuh, i thort so). alors puis today we started drawing, in a manner of speaking; no painting at all, in fact, so i was deprived of the chance to wear what has become my standard studio uniform: paint-stained green hoodie, one of a series of ancient barcelona themed t-shirts, paint stained sweat pants held together with safety-pins, and a pair of bright pink zigzag bedsocks (regifted from erica, thank you lovey wherever you are; it's nippy in that attic sometimes and everyone is jealous of my snazzy socks.) the whole ensemble is serious haute couture; i do not understand these people (basically the entire rest of the class) who can oil paint in regular clothes and not get anything at all on them. i end up with paint smeared on my nose, in my hair, on my left ankle... and the kicker is that half the time the paint is in colours i wasn't even using. a mystery we do not have time to solve today BECAUSE there is lots of other stuff to talk about.

so the drawing exercise that we spent all day doing (i might shoot myself if we spend a second entire day doing it, or possibly commit harikiri on the scary huge (like three feet long) rusty meat cleaver we saw for sale at the flea market, but it was interesting and i think useful to do for a day) was gesture drawings. what that ended up meaning was a drawing of the figure in three lines: two to go from the crown of the head down to the two legs (and on the way down you use them to delineate the forms of the torso and pelvis) and the third for the armspan. the teacher's explanation of it was significantly less succinct, so i am likely losing some of the subtleties here of what we were supposed to be doing, but his lecture was (to put it nicely) extremely right brained. so far to the right side of the brain, in fact, that i would say it was actually floating out about six inches past his right ear. he's a lovely guy (and a very good draftsman) but he's got a tendency when he is lecturing to slightly pompous abstraction and a case of verbosification to rival george bush. i stopped trying to make head or tail out of what he was saying about ten minutes into the lecture, and entertained myself taking furtive notes on some of the more extraterrestrial statements. my favourite of the morning:
'what we are talking about here is the serendipity between the intentionality of movement, and the elegance of the linear functionality that interplays, in ways both obvious and not so obvious, with the physical empathy that we have with the figure. stop me if this isn't making sense to anyone.'
M (english guy) came up to me at the break and said, poker-faced, 'so do you know this word foonctionaliteh? i've bin sehyin' 'foonction' me whole life, ah suppose ah've had it wrong, haven't i?' he did also add, however, that he's been taught the technique before and that it did a great deal for his drawing, so we'll see.

today was also the annual fair (tres exciting) - we had a roundabout, several stalls set up where very large men with very large mustaches could drink beer and rose (which somehow seems wrong - if you are going to go to all the trouble of growing an enormous Manly Mustache, should you really be spoiling the effect by standing around drinking pink wine? but i digress), a flea market with a lot of crap and a few nice things (i was briefly lusting after a full set of copper pans but then i realized a) i would have to get them home b) i have pans at home anyway and c) the one kind of pan i desperately need a new one of is non-stick frying pan, which is not what was for sale.) they also had baby animals (chickies! piglets! lambs! all worthy of uploading to www.cuteoverload.com), and the biggest temptation of ALL: puppies for sale. they had some that looked like a cross between a great dane and a lab (black) that the lady said were a german cf3@gker#styz&xcbnm (for those of you whose french is more rudimentary, cf3@gker#styz&xcbnm is french for, "a word that a french person says in conversation to me that i have no clue what they just said.' french people seem to use that word a lot, as it turns out.) but anyway, the dogs were SO ADORABLE with their big puddy feet and fuzzy muzzles and the grownup versions (there were two there) were incredibly handsome, and if i am ever going to get a dog, it just might have to be a german cf3@gker#styz&xcbnm. but instead of spending 350 euros on a purebred puppy, i spent 5 on a rusty platter (something i really needed, right) and called it a day.

in the evening i took advantage of the sun (sun! wow! haven't seen one of those for a while) and went for a long ramble along the river & lake; there are swans and lily pads and willow trees and it is just lovely lovely (and almost deserted, as all the residents of AC were busy slamming shots of pink bubbly, buying gigantic meat cleavers, and eating cotton candy in the main square). as i came back home, things in the square were winding down, and along our street the only remaining sign of the party was a loudspeaker sort of forlornly playing madonna's 'material girl' to the empty street. it was kind of cute.
after dinner a bit more painting (ann is almost almost finished. she needs to dry a bit in some places before i can finish her, but i reckon by tomorrow night she will be done), and now into bed with my alice munro novel..
love to all.