cheese fondue! mmm....

voici new model
jiminy crickets, i am fatiguee. a long day of paint huffing. today i was a Lady Who Lunches; C & M and i went to the pub for lunch (the only restaurant of the town is closed except for summer weekends, but the pub is actually pretty good: savoyard sausage with potatoes, cheese fondue, green salad... mmm.... profound food coma during Head Honcho's afternoon painting demo, however, so it will not be a regular occurrence). M won yet another painting prize for international artist magazine, and needed help with writing a blurb. she came over again tonight, and is feeling extremely pleased because it's now finished and sent off and she will have the weekend free of worrying about it (it's amazing how much trying to write in english stresses her out; she was imagining spending every evening for the next week on it). i have already told her that my motives for helping her are entirely selfish, and that if/when i have a baby, i am fully planning on ringing her for a commission and will expect her to drop everything to come to california and do a 16 x 10 foot mural in the living room. (she said no problem).

P. comes tomorrow, so i will have to do a lot of cleani... i mean, i will wave a duster quickly around the always impeccable flat, laundry so he has clean sheets, a market run, borrowing an extra duvet from Head Honcho, etc. hope he arrives OK - i haven't actually checked to make sure that google maps knows of the existence of AC, but he hasn't emailed to say otherwise, so fingers crossed. i have made rezzies at what is supposed to be a scrumptious hole in the wall in vihiers, a whopping 20 km away (hey, man, you get access to a rental car, you spread your wings and fly while you got the chance) - i think the potatoes and cheese fondue i ate at lunch today will hold me until tomorrow evening quite nicely. i had (literally) a piece of bread and a small pile of raspberries for dinner, and i'm still full.

painting update: so i don't know if it's a fluke or what, but i think i might be getting better. i like the 2 day drawing of s.j. (above) much better than the 2 day drawing i did of krystle, and so far i like the painting i'm working on of s.j. slightly better than i liked my painting of krystle at the same stage (although it's annoying to already be able to identify major problems with it this early on that i don't know how to correct). i am doing my best to incorporate some of the stuff that michelle says into my painting, even though it's hard not to revert back to the paint-whatever-bit-of-the-model-appeals-to-you-most-at-that-moment technique, and to really try and define blocks of colour before i put them down, rather than just smooshing the paint around until it turns into grey soup. hunh. dunno. it's also hard to nail down how much improvement is due to the teaching, and how much is due to just having nothing else to do all day every day for this long a stretch.

okey dokey smokey time to go and attain unconsciousness....