personal takes on life, the universe, and everything
The ghost of the original image of this canvas is going to be visible, but only in the composition. Don’t ask me why! I’m not a good enough painter to understand why it’s doing this. I’m just doing it. With paint and with narrative I can be utterly impulsive, letting the spirit blow as it …
Violets. Aren’t they pretty? Such a charming picture to print—or rather, re-print in Ackermann’s Repository. The original image was a hugely popular one around France in 1814 and early 1815, so much so that it was quickly banned by the French government and continued to be so on and off for the next sixty years. …
One of the classic French dishes is cassoulet. Everybody loves it, it’s endlessly adaptable, and it’s easy to make — in France. Grocery stores in the southwest of France have special shelf and refrigerator sections dedicated to the ingredients. Duck is notably cheaper than chicken, and cassoulet is on every menu in town, like cheeseburgers. …
Remember this canvas is recycled. Black is an annoying color to paint over, since it might show through. To forestall this I went through and whitened some of the black: Also, if you peer closely at the canvas? You can see the red Sharpie I used to sketch some lines. The bottom of the …
Let’s write a reality check. Not all that long ago I repeatedly heard that the unemployment rate in the US was not 4.9 percent as official numbers stated, but closer to 42 percent. This intel came from news sources trusted by a great number of Americans, from pundits and political operatives to a moderator at a …
The Things People Say: Rhetorical Devices and the Abuse of Statistics Read More »
This is a cold, creamy sauce or soup that you can serve with tacos, curry, rijstafl, jerked meat, or anything spicy that wants a cool side dish or sauce for contrast. It’s also insanely green, which is cool all by itself! It works best if you have a blender, because avocados blend up to a …
My sister and I agree that there is something special about Death Valley, California. This specialness is not the weather, or the silence, but instead floats in the air at 200 feet below sea level, bringing with it calm and hope. We always leave with this calm hope, returning to our daily cares and able …
What should the painting look like? I want to paint some of the landscapes I saw in 2020. Perhaps like this. These are tourist site photos of some the cliffside towns in southern France.: For want of time I never painted anything precisely like this while I was there. But watercolor was never entirely satisfactory, …
Landscape Painting 2: Inspiration, Materials, Sketch Read More »
I’m going to post a word, and I want you to tell me what mental image you get when you read it. Ready? Penknife. So what picture did you get in your mind? Maybe an object with short blades that fold up out of a protective cover? Or a Swiss Army knife with seventeen other …
More than the blinkering strangeness of the COVID pandemic loaded with fear and vituperation and the baffling denial by anti-vaxers and mask mandate resisters. More than navigating the unchartered waters of retirement amid the relentless creep of aging. It’s easy, too easy, to blame my rising pessimism on social media. Before people gathered on Meta …
Those of you who have been around this blog for a while may recall that I occasionally paint. I have too much creativity, and it overflows from fiction to knitting to, lately, painting. Because it’s not my core strength, I actually do not paint that much I knew that 2020 was going to be the …
Follow Thor and me as we lose ourselves in the fascinating maze of canals and narrow lanes of extravagant Venice. NOTE: Since travel is still iffy with the pandemic continuing, I started a blog series offering a virtual vacation and time-travel to my first big trip with Thor in 2008. Italy! Starting with highlight photos …
The Rambling Writer’s Italy, part 26: Lost in the Venice Labyrinth Read More »
I’d be willing to bet that most people have had the experience of reading a headline in a news article (or media chyron) only to have the content of the report fail to live up to the headline. This happens so often in some media outlets that I simply redact everything in the headline except …
The Things People Say: Headlines, Fault Lines and Colorization Read More »
