June 19, 2010

I can't believe it is Saturday, I knew the week was passing fast, but this is amazing.

Yesterday I spent painting in oils. I had forgotten how hard it is to push the paint around. My arms were very tired by the end of the day. Since I had been working with gouache for a long time, my muscles had forgotten they might be called on. Who says painting is easy? I can hardly wait to get back at it. The day was productive.

I am remembering a book I read many years ago. Needless to say, I can't remember the title. But it was about an artist who was missing. His dealer goes to his studio, and sees his sketchbooks, which he would never allow anyone to look at. The dealer can't resist and he takes them. Then the rest of the book is the story of the sketchbooks. They are like a journal, and one day he writes about painting a head. At the end of the session, he says, it was a good day. He talks about the painting, and then he says in a couple of weeks it will be a product, that I will give to my dealer, and he will sell it. But today was a good day.

If anyone knows of this book. I hope you will tell me the title so I can read it again. It was a wonderful book.

Since I have been working on my series, Poems of the Desert, I have discovered that women writers and visual artists are claiming the West. And that the West represents a way of thinking, a sense of adventure, a willingness to cross into a new frontier. "Stories, poems, and personal essays (visual works) are being written (painted) today in the Rocky Mountain West by women whose voices could not have been heard twenty years ago. For, as the women of our generations have begun to talk to one another, a radically new way of perceiving the western experience has emerged. This vision draws on the self-reliance and courage of the old western mythology but sees greater strength in community, in making connections in interdependence." --Kim Barnes and Mary Clearman Blew, Circle of Women

"You go Girl!"