Day 13

Today’s painting is brought to you by the letters P I O O M & A! (As in “pulled it out of my ass”.) I didn’t have a photograph to use for the image I wanted, so I figured I’d just cross my fingers and hope it didn’t come out looking like the Michelin Man attacking the yellow brick road. Mom’s going to chuckle to herself when she sees this one, because she’ll remember me whining about how boring and lame landscapes are and how much I hate painting them- which was true years ago. I felt like every piece of “art” I ever saw for sale in a Bed, Bath and Beyond or on the wall at Aaron Brothers was some boring collection of “happy little trees”.. snore, puke, asphixiation threat from snoring and puking at the same time, etc.

But now that I’m a little older and I live closer to the wilderness than I did when I was in the bay area, I enjoy the compositions that nature makes and the big blocks of color. I don’t enjoy painting every tiny little leaf, mind you, (remember- impatient!) but I have found a way to like doing them, as I discovered today, working on this thing.

I expected it to be stormy again all day but it was clear this  morning, for the most part. I really love the drive out to Folsom because it’s so beautiful. The farther out you get into gold country, the more the city structures begin to fall away. The far-off Oaks make blue blotches against the yellow hills. The giant white cotton ball clouds come creeping over the Sierras with cold wind puffing them up, and on a handful of days, we get a nice, deep blue sky.

Unfortunately, most other days the sky is hazy from aerial spraying. Next time it looks like a couple of pilots are playing tic-tac-toe, remember the word “chemtrails” and google it. That’s why there’s a thin white line there in the sky, in contrast to this meringue of a natural cloud, which I textured a bit with a palette knife. I don’t know why the blue and yellow is so stuck on me lately, but I guess I’ve got to just go with it until it’s done- which may be never. I always seem to come back to the primaries. Here it is straight-on:

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