Day 5

I’m the kind of person who will listen to the same song 50 or 60 times in a row. I know, it’s weird. In general, I have what my husband and I call “jukebox brain”, a syndrome characterized by the immediate conversion of any snippet of conversation into the closest matching lyric and the ensuing vocalization of said song. While there is no cure for jukebox brain, symptoms can be temporarily relieved by successfully getting a really annoying song stuck in the head of anyone in the vicinity.

Today I had Feist’s “I feel it all” stuck on repeat inside my skull, so I put it on when I sat down to do something with this canvas panel. To me, this belle from Nova Scotia has a sweet, soft, yearning voice. Even though some of her songs sound upbeat and romantic on first listen, I found that when I really listened to the lyrics in the acoustic (also the only) version YouTube would give me on my iPod (why does it do that?!?) they aren’t all happy. Fragments like “I’ll be the one to break my heart” and “the truth lies” hung out at the back of my throat.

I wrote a lyric on the panel in white pastel and painted over it with watered-down acrylic so it would show through a little and dropped some watercolor on. The prussian blue seeped into the canvas teeth and I turned it and let it drip. I lit a candle to drop some wax on the watercolor to protect it while I washed over the panel with dark yellow. Some crimson, acrylic medium, scraped away wax dots, oil pastel and conte crayon later, here we are- with an abstract that to me looks a lot like a dandelion at the moment of nuclear rapture. Yep, so.. deep breath.. day 5. Time for bed.