Very nice digs Old Dog. Spacious and light and airy, and hardwood floors, many people, my sister among them, swoon at the thought of hardwood floors. And well-kept which I know to be the nature of Old Dog. I am guessing that the bedroom is off to the left and the bed is so well made that a nickel would bounce from it. And wait, what is that on yonder wall? Is that a precious piece of deathless art? Ties the whole apartment together in my humble opinion.
I did take sort of a drawing class at the Cultural Center. There was no teacher but there were three hours with a nude model, which may sound good but this was at a senior center and our models were age-appropriate, and us old folk, we may be chock full of wisdom, but we don't look so hot with our clothes off.
I didn't do it for fun. I only did it because I thought it would be good for me. The people in my watercolor class are always complaining about how they would like to be looser, which is not my problem at all. I need to be tighter. And I guess it had that effect. I took the course with my sister and at first we were like totally embarrassed to be in the company of such fine artists, and would attempt to cover up our miserable scribblings whenever one of the old masters strolled by.
Eventually we got better. Or what actually happened is not that we noticed our scribblings getting better, as we noticed that the work of the old masters no longer seemed so good to us, so that must mean we were getting better.
I guess I will stick with that thing about trying to make the image look better. Before I touch brush to paper I am thinking of what changes I will make, and then as I paint and I fuck up and things get out of control I just go with the way the painting is going and never try to steer it back to the original image.
People in class are almost always working from photographs and sometimes there will be some dark splotch in the background, could be a boat, maybe a truck, maybe a mountain. and I am all like leave it out. Nobody knows what it is, nobody cares, it adds nothing compositionally. But they are like afraid, they think the photo is beautiful, but don't seem to know why so they are afraid to leave out any part of it, and when they are done there is that dark splotch and they haven't even tried to make a boat or a truck or a mountain out of it, it is just their best rendition of that dark splotch, makes me crazy. I would like to come up behind them and slam my cane, make that a Louisville slugger, on their table and oh, I don't know, bawl them out in front of the class or something.
I like Beagles' thing about what an artist is. There are a lot of those high faluting definitions of an artist like they are these visionaries blah, blah, blah. I think it is just show biz. If people like those big eyes paintings or Elvis on black velvet then go for it. Like back when grown-ups were on our case for reading nothing but comic books and some kindly aunt or uncle would come to our defense, Well at least they are reading.
Linguistic fun fact. As I was getting ready to publish this post I saw one of those annoying squiggly red lines under faluting so I got into the googlemobile to find the correct spelling and it is falutin and not only that it is all one word: highfalutin. Why? Because it is that's why.
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