Nugget

I decided something.  In my one and only post last year I mentioned that it was a craptastic year and I would tell you about it later, but I'm not going to.  Except for the worst part, because we are coming up on the anniversary of when my baby dog Rabbit died.  It was the worst two weeks of my life and then a very long slow road to acceptance of our new normal.  If I were to psychoanalyze myself I would say an overwhelming (and misplaced) sense of guilt plus debilitating sadness made me feel it wouldn't be appropriate or fair to do something that gave me joy, so I couldn't really think about painting.  Some people would have used art as a way to work thru the grief, and I tried a little bit with a new medium, but I just had to process some heavy shit internally.

It was months before I put acrylic paint on a canvas again, and when I did this is what happened:

It may not look like much, and I haven't even varnished it, but this piece means a lot to me.  There was no plan; a friend who knows I love Payne's Gray gave me a couple of tubes for my birthday so that was my starting point.  I troweled it on with a big palette knife, grabbed some additional colors, and even let some of the previously painted canvas show thru.  It is perfectly imperfect.

I miss Rabbit every day and I'm still not always able to talk about her without crying (like right now).  She was a weirdo little nugget and I am eternally grateful that I got to be her mom.

Cartoon Vibes

I want to show you real quick a few things I've painted so far this year.  One day I suddenly knew I needed to paint stripes.  Maybe it came to me in a dream - I can't remember.  The vision was very clear, which is unusual for me, and the painting turned out EXACTLY AS I WANTED!  For obvious reasons, it's called "Cartoon Vibes":

This one may stay in my personal collection forever, I love it that much.  And because the end result was so cool, I painted another:

Cartoon Vibes #2?  Weirdo color combo, but it's still good.  And here's #3:

Then I had a bit of a detour, but stayed in stripe city.  A while back I bought some Jo Sonja paint, because I'm always up for trying new brands and a friend said she loves it.  I got nine different colors (plus rose gold, but that's not relevant to this story).  On a whim I grabbed the nine colors and laid them out on my table in no particular order, just however they fell out of my hand.  That became my repeating pattern and we ended up with something that I SWEAR matches a sweater my sister had in high school.  So I named this one "100% Wool":

Lordy, lordy - there's something about stripes.  The cartoon canvases are all 18" x 24" and this one is 12" x 36".  Just to show that even wee ones can be striped, here's a 6" x 12":

If you follow me on Instagram you already know that I took advantage of a random nail in a random (and very tall) tree stump to get this photo, and I hilariously thought it looked like a member of the Queen's Guard with a striped mustache.  Can you see it?  Yes?  No?  Is it just me?  Should I name it "All The Queen's Men"?  That painting didn't quite turn out as expected, but it did somehow end up resembling a rugby shirt my sister also had in high school.  Eighties fashion, man - it's a thing all over again.