My clementine’s reddish and not very fine.
It looks like a pumpkin that came off the vine
To embrace a tomato lasciviously
And make a new hybrid that just shouldn’t be.
Since I’m a beginner, though, I’m free to say
That it looked just like this on my table today.
I should just do what I’ve long thought of doing: buy myself some glass bricks and experiment with them instead of relying on chance. These were taken with my iPhone, highly cropped, and subjected to some color manipulation. I’m going to take some more photos at this same location with my Fuji X10, which should give much better quality images.
Not really getting into the painting tonight, I guess because I’m not trying to do anything in particular, just messing around with some fresh tubes of paint, trying a little blending and a little amateurish decoration. This may be a self-limiting experiment. However, I’ve confirmed that in fact blue and yellow still do make green, just like they did when I was in kindergarten.
The Neighborhood Co-op had bundles of eight roses for sale for six dollars. What a deal! Happy Valentine’s Day.
El perico
El perico – crop
Palette 2-11-16
The face in the paint
Since I’m also taking Spanish, I decided to use Spanish for the title of my little class painting today. The parakeet needs more work, but is, I think, at least identifiable as some kind of bird. But I’m feeling very excited about doing the close-ups. I needed something like this just now to get back to taking photographs. Can’t always be on a road trip. And I can do this no matter how cold or nasty it gets outside!
I’m taking my first painting class. Acrylics. Phrases like “Baby’s First Painting” or “Baby’s First Paint Set” keep running through my head. They publish books with titles like that, don’t they? Anyway, regardless of whether or not I prove to have any talent, I’m finding that this is a peaceful and interesting activity. Since my aim is ultimately to paint abstracts (of course!), I’m much more pleased with the appearance of the “palette” from tonight’s messing around than I am with the actual painting. (That messing-around painting is not shown above, in case you’re puzzling over the colors. The top photo shows what is supposed to look like a sphere, painted the first night in class, and what is supposed to look like an apple, which I painted last night in order to practice a bit with dimension in color.) I’m thinking that I could put different colors of paint in a paper bowl, blend them in different ways, photograph them, and just skip the applying-them-to-canvas part. This class may not set me on the road to becoming a painter in a traditional sense, but it may give me a new way of being an artist.
The clouds turned glorious tonight for just a brief spell. I was in the strip-mall hell of east Carbondale, but I found a place to pull over and get some unobstructed shots. The top two I only color-corrected. The bottom one I exaggerated for a painterly effect. There’s way too much color noise in this photo, but I’m not yet proficient enough in Photoshop to have improved it much. I should have chosen a lower ISO. Fuji X10.
Light fixture no. 1, SIH Cancer Institute
Light fixture no. 2, SIH Cancer Institute
iPhone photos.
I made a Walmart trip tonight. The store is deserted at about 10 p.m., so I’ve been going pretty late. When I checked out, the clerk spun the bag carousel around a couple of times to make sure we had everything loaded in my cart. He had it going pretty fast, and suddenly I had a vision of all the Walmart workers in this totally deserted store at 3 a.m. running up and down, spinning all the bag carousels.
Naturally, I asked the clerk, a middle-aged, not-very-happy-looking man, if they ever did that. He sort of grimaced, and I said, “I gather that would be frowned upon.” He said, “You’d be fired in about a minute.” And then, in a toneless, stoic voice, he said some immortal words: “There is no fun at Walmart.”
So now, writing this, I am envisioning a musical titled “There Is No Fun at Walmart,” and it would include a number where Walmart workers, feeling a momentary, illusory sense of liberation, would go waltzing down the checkout lines spinning the bag carousels and singing a song celebrating freedom.
This could be a thing. It really could be done, by someone who knows how to write a musical—a previously anonymous, toiling-in-the-trenches Chinese or Guatemalan composer, say—and you could pay your actors minimum wage so that you could sell tickets at low, low prices, and it could be a hit.
Maybe you could even do it in such a way that Walmart couldn’t sue you for millions.
But I doubt it.
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*On further reflection, the number itself would be called “There Is No Fun at Walmart/Carousel Bagatelle.” The musical, for purposes of satire and a better title, would be called “Thank You for Shopping at Walmart!” The first number would, of course, be “The Greeter’s Song,” or possibly “The Greeter’s Lament.” You see, I’m actually thinking about this.
iPhone photo, cropped, color-balanced.
VAPOR AND FLOW 