Walnut

A few weeks ago, I found a wood frame at the thrift store. Spent a few days looking at it, trying to figure out what it wanted to be. It said, a walnut. I imagined tiny portraits, curled figures, decorative objects, but it just kept saying no, just a walnut. So I took out the nut bowl and arranged a few walnuts on the table, with some filberts for contrast, but the composition wouldn't work. Just one walnut, stupid.

Fine.

So I painted a walnut.

Walnuts are meaningful to me. In the winter of 1990, we spent Christmas at a great aunt's cabin in the sequoia forest. My grandparents showed up with a mesh sack of walnuts the size of a dead body, which they bought at a roadside stand on the drive up from the airport. They dropped it in the middle of the room where my mother and aunts were sitting and said, "Whatever you can shell, you can keep." For the next week, we all sat in the cabin by the wood stove, talking and cracking and bagging up walnuts in big ziplock bags. By the end of the holiday, we had shelled about half the sack, and everyone was packing fat baggies of nuts into their suitcases. My grandmother looked from the mesh sack of unshelled walnuts to the neat baggies of nuts my mother had stacked on the coffee table, and said, "Actually, we'll just take the shelled ones. There's no way we can get that sack of walnuts on the plane." So we went back to the reservation that winter with a sack of walnuts the size of half a dead body rolling around in the back of the truck. There were no satellite dishes or phone lines on Black Mesa, and for much of the winter the mud roads were impassable, so we took our entertainment where we could find it. We had the only VCR in the teacher's housing, and a subscription to a mail service that shipped 2 movies every other month, which Donna (the former cop, who would shoot herself in the leg the following spring) filled up with Mel Gibson and Bruce Willis films. And we had nuts, goddamn it. For the rest of the winter, teachers trudged over to our trailer in the snow, kicked the muck off their boots, and plopped down on our couch with empty mason jars to watch Lethal Weapon 2 for the hundredth time and crack walnuts. The nutmeat went into one mason jar, and the shells went into the other. Donna and Diane lived in a hogan down the hill, with no electricity, no heater, and a mountain lion stalking the outhouse (which would lead to the aforementioned gunshot wound), and the walnut shells were really good for throwing into the wood stove to keep the fire burning on long, cold nights.

Walnuts in the winter mean safety, family, friends, and warmth. And Danny Glover on an exploding toilet. The important stuff.

long weekend painting - tv and toads

I love painting this kid.

I've been using a new brand of clear gesso, and it's perfect. If you're shopping for this stuff, make sure you don't buy one with "tooth". Tooth is code for "sandpaper". Or maybe "kitty litter". Or "actual, ground-up teeth". This is not something you want in a painting surface.

When I was happy with that, I pulled out my still-mostly-blank painting and added a bronze toad. 

The face took 7 hours, the toad took 45 minutes. That is how it goes sometimes.

paint and murder yarn

I'd like to be the kind of painter who produces large, atmospheric portraits and elaborate still-life scenes, or pages of tightly detailed pen-and-ink drawings with gruesome humor, but what I am is a librarian who likes small, soft, cheap paintbrushes and 5x7 rectangles of paper. I admire designs filled with flowers and bats and skulls, and what I paint is fire hydrants and children and cats. That's okay.

underdrawing-in-progress

Monday was my first painting day in more than a month. I got overenthusiastic and ended up biting off more than I could chew, because I bought a new adhesive to mount my oil paper onto hardboard and didn't have any boards smaller than 2 feet wide. And I'm not going to cut them down to comfortable 5x7 chunks, because power tools are on the top of my "DO NOT APPROACH" list, right next to fireworks and trampolines. I still have a lump on my head from falling face-first into the pointy end of a barbell in 2017. Whatever kind of a painter I think I am, I'll be a worse one without any fingers. But probably more popular, as a human interest piece.

So now I am staring at the expanse of empty background resentfully. Who wants to spend hours painting backgrounds when there are little pink ears and fat fingers and the soft corners of mouths to get caught up in? What was I thinking, painting something this big?

Too late now. Get it done, self.

This is just a detail. The rest is EMPTY EMPTY EMPTY.

And I have been giving my knitting another shot at killing me. Again. Of course.

 Lungs, like swatches, are for sissies.

varnish vids

The best part of finishing a painting is the varnishing. 

Even when the varnish reveals bits you mismatched because the color sunk between sittings. Like knitting a swatch before starting a sweater that won’t fit you, oiling in so your colors match is for sissies. 

I made sure to varnish in the lucky cat hairs - my marks of authenticity. The only realistic art heist crime novel will be cracked by detectives who can identify pet hair, and it will be about 3 paragraphs long. “Unless Fra Filippo Lippi owned a maltipoo in 1469, you will find, sirs, that this is a FORGERY.” The End. 

who knows where

The song I was listening to on my evening run told me to follow the strange trails, so I went trespassing into a dark construction site like a complete ding-dong.

 

Here is the resolution for 2019: put down the feel-bad machine. I bought a paper journal to replace my blog. I'll still upload art, like this post, but I've removed twitter, facebook, newsfeeds, netflix, and pretty much everything else except my e-reader. It's time to stop dropping breadcrumbs and be done. 

My email is tempestpilot at the g mails, and I'll receive direct messages from fb if anyone needs to get hold of me. 

 -h