Author: -N-

New Challenges

One thing I find interesting is my need to “drop bombs” on my daily life.  What this means is simply that getting into a rut is not a good thing, and shaking up the patterns and routines are necessary to keep life interesting.  For example, I have settled into this pattern:  coffee, breakfast, clean up myself and the house, figure out evening meals, and then paint and draw.  Much as I like the last, I find myself getting stuck in a rut.  The other things I like doing don’t get done.  And, I get really bored; worse, I feel like I am not “accomplishing” anything!  That’s the problem with having a lot of interests and an impatient, restless personality.  I irritate myself as well as others.

The other day, I finally got around to buying a new laptop computer.  My old ones were worthless except as boat anchors.  Poor graphics and connectivity.  Slow.  I have one, a Windows XP machine dedicated to my film scanner.  Another was not forward compatible with Windows – can you believe that???  Anyway, as a result, I had to clean up the bloat ware on the new laptop and install software I use.  With everything internet-based, it’s interesting to now own a laptop with only a few external connections and no DVD drive.  The result was I finally broke down and decided to enroll in Lightroom CC for photography.

I really like LR as a jump-off point for other software to edit photographs.  The catalog system is great.  However, the Creative Cloud version has some things I need to learn!  I have never been a cloud-based person, preferring to keep stuff on my own hardware rather than rely on others to take care of me.  As times change, though, so must we, even if I am not sure this is always for the best.  What I know I will like is being able to access my photos from either my laptop or my home computer without having to use sneaker net anymore.  That is also what I like about Google and being able to sync across computers.

The challenge here is making sure I do what I like.  It’s actually very hard to find time to do all the things I want to do.  Poor weather has kept me in the house a lot – who wants to go out in pouring rain? – but that is like house arrest after a bit.  The LR is going to be a challenge, and fun.  The bigger challenge is to find the time to do so many other things!

I have made one promise to myself, though:  I will draw or paint every day, no matter what else is on the agenda.

 

Disastrous Fun

I promised to paint more buildings.  So I did.  I painted a house in the middle of a cold, cold climate in the dead of winter.  I made better house drawings when I was 10.

I have really lost touch with real cold, real snow, and a real winter.  I do have memories, though, of the intense gloom of the woods in northern New York state.  There was something so magical about them – the silence of the woods, the snow falling, the sense of being alone in the world.  I liked the idea of capturing that with a building, on water, in the dead of winter.

Buildings mean people, even in the middle of nowhere, on a river.  People usually mean unnecessary noise, and in the woods or hiking, the last thing I want is noise.  Silence is something to be savored in our noisy age.

So, let’s get back to the “disastrous fun” of this posting.  “Disastrous” as this is such an amateurish painting, and “fun” because the more I got into, and the more I realized how awful it was, the more fun I had.  Making a “good” painting no longer had any meaning – it was the experience.  And the snow.

The final touch was the snowflakes.  White gouache to spatter.  I spattered on the painting.  It flew onto my glasses.  I spattered some more.  It flew onto my glasses.  I changed how I was spattering, and there were streaks.

Snowflakes don’t streak in the real world.  Spattering paint is an art form in and of itself.