The flayed man

Well, they were out of beef short ribs, so I got pork spare ribs instead, and... hmm.

It’s kind of... it’s a bit “Theon Greyjoy”, isn’t it? I should have put the other two ribs in the composition, but I dunked them in marinade..

I like the loose brush strokes, anyway.

the wild car

The boys didn't take any good pictures of fire hydrants on their trip to Japan, so I painted Ron's busted Ford Anglia for them to remember the trip by, instead. 

We've still got a few jelly slugs and chocolate wands to compose a still-life, but if I do that I'll be in danger of eating my models again (see: walnuts).

No, if it comes to painting food, I'm going to be painting a pork chop, out of pettiness (I still want that $350 pork chop). Or maybe I'll paint a cut of meat that is more locally-favored, like ox tails.

or maybe... maybe not

Short ribs, then.

BEAUTIFUL - pin it on the inspiration board 

I will go to the neighborhood grocery and see which meat speaks to me - skipping past the skinned pig faces, which just scream, mostly.

I have, as mentioned, the dietary scruples of a raccoon, so I would eat pork face if someone prepared it for me, but that's an ingredient that would be hard to explain to the police if they looked in your freezer.

plein air fail

If I don't go to a painting workshop this year, I thought, I could spend the money on actual paintings and support the same artists without having to go anywhere or learn anything. Flawless logic. I was narrowing it down to a painting of a raw porkchop and one of a dead raccoon, and that is when the man packed up the portable easels and said we were going painting. 

We drove over to my mother's house, ditched the kids, and went across the street to Valley of the Temples. I don't have an aptitude for painting buildings, and I've never painted a landscape, so why not start with a Buddhist temple at the base of a rainy mountain? SURE. This is a good idea.

One look at the architecture on that temple, and I started auditioning rocks and puddles to paint, instead. There were handsome turtles sunning themselves and nice frogs loitering in the pond, but the problem with painting from life is that you don't actually have zoom vision, and it is very hard to pitch an easel in the middle of a pond. That pea-sized speck from where you're standing is going to be a pea-sized speck on your canvas. Stupid analog eyeballs.

We set up our easels way in the back, off of the pathway, next to a strip of warning tape and a sign that says DO NOT ENTER, and tourists still picked their way through the mud like goats to get behind us and watch us paint. Whiny children yelled, "I WANT TO PAAAAINT," and their parents looked at me expectantly, as if I would turn around and hand them my brushes. If you are doing a thing in public, you are a public entertainment feature, after all. Luckily, it started to pour just as I was considering flinging one of the children into the koi pond by the ankles for the black swans to eat, and the tourists cleared out for a few minutes. I tried painting in the rain, because oil paint is waterproof, but it turns out that paint boxes fill up with rain and brushes skid uselessly over water droplets, so we finally admitted defeat and went for a beer at the mall, instead.

"To still-life painting!" we toasted.

The guy who should have posed for me

nope

STAY STILL, CLOUDS

Fine.

It was a good day - though next time we're buying a pork chop and a dead animal and painting in the studio, instead.

nuts

It is freezing cold over here, and the winter windstorm knocked over our banana tree just as it was making tiny bananas. AGAIN. Third year in a row. We will never have bananas. We are doomed to subsist on lychees forever.

The mainland newspapers noticed that it snowed on Maui and they spent a few days panicking about it. You guys, it snows every winter up on the mountains. The temperature drops, it rains for days, and the wind knocks down trees. This is our February weather. They missed the real news story, which was that a couple of endangered hornbills escaped from the zoo and the zookeepers chased them around in circles with giant nets like Wile E. Coyote. It was beautiful.

Had a couple hours at home after a trip to the hospital’s x-ray department with my most accident prone child (it’s just a sprain, not a break; cafeteria benches attract gravity zephyrs and she just crashes right down off of them), so I painted some nuts and posted a couple of upside-down process videos over on Instagram. May need to devise a film setup that is better than a phone propped on a corn starch container.

I might lighten up that background so we can see the shadows better

And here is a picture of me not getting out of the warm car because it is rainy and cold out there. 

Happy Valentine's Day

First get it covered with paint

Well, her head and forearm look like detached puppet limbs, but every bit of the surface is painted. Next week I’ll go in and repaint the hair, adjust the neck so it matches her face, and soften that wooden arm.

I’m just glad she has fingers now.

It looks a lot better in evening lamplight than it does in washed-out daylight. When I get fed up, I’ll just hang it in the hallway where there is no natural light and call it a design element.

So this year my goal is to “put down the feel-bad machine”. Go analog, read books, journal on paper, only post art (here I have rationalized “but this part of the  post is just a quick update, it doesn't count”). It had all been going pretty well - and then my car was burgled.

Nothing was taken, because I don't have drugs or cash or snacks or whatever the hell else they thought I'd be keeping in a glove box

So now we have new locks and a home security system that has been pinging me with hundreds of alerts a day for every marauding chicken, cat, and pigeon that passes by. This feels kind of the opposite of disconnecting from the feel-bad machine. NICE TRY, TECHNOLOGY. I am handing the digital reigns over to the man and teenager. They can yell with their analog voice boxes when it's time for me to come charging out of bed with a baseball bat.