INSPIRATION

"The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case." -Chuck Close

 

I read this quote the other day and I do believe Mr. Close hit the nail squarely on the head

 

I guess if you have no need or desire to learn to be a better painter, you can wait for inspiration to hit but if you want to be a good painter you paint!  You paint when you’re excited about a new idea.  You paint when you haven’t a clue what you want to paint.  You paint when you are feeling full of piss and vinegar and you paint when you feel like crap!

A couple of days ago, I woke up after a really lousy night’s sleep and the very thought of standing at the easel with a paintbrush in my hand was, in a word, unappealing.  Still, I looked through all my photos…and my facebook friends’ photos, too…. in a vain search for ‘inspiration.’ 

It never showed up.

So, like I do every other morning, I opened my paint box, put a new canvas on my easel and picked up a brush.  Using the leftover paint on my palette, I began. 

It wasn’t complicated.

I put paint on the brush and put that paint on the canvas.  I smeared it around some.  Next, I picked up another leftover color and repeated the process.

This is the result.

 

CACTUS CANYON

16 x 20

It is one of my favorite paintings I’ve done lately….begun with no inspiration and no real desire to even paint. 

I have learned to trust the process.  I have learned that I will make a good painting or a bad one but in either case, I will have learned something.  I will have grown in skill.

And that is inspiring.

 

My paintings are available at:

http://www.etsy.com/shop/SKayArt

 

YOU'D THINK I'D LEARN

I've been in Tucson for nearly 20 years.

I've lived in a house with a yard for most of those years.

I've been an avid gardener the whole time.

Over the weekend, we finally got after the weed/bermuda grass jungle which appeared in our front yard after all our winter rains.

The front yard is mostly gravel. In Tucson, the cost of keeping both our front yard and back yard in grass would be prohibitive anway, but our little house has a sort of circle drive in front. The gravel mulch does help to keep unwanted flora at bay but there are definitely some problem areas.

It's not really the weeds that are the big problem. It is the dadgum Bermuda grass! The stuff is rampantly invasive! Any area which gets a bit of moisture will quickly produce a tangle of Bermuda grass which can only be controlled by regular applications of toxic chemicals. That, too, can get prohibitively expensive.

So, in the Spring, we cut down and pull out as much of it as we can and then start with the spraying.

One area in the front is 'decorated' thusly.

I wanted one Santa Rita Prickly Pear cactus because the blooms are awesome, but mostly because I love their winter color.  These are in the couryard at De Grazia's Gallery.

Many years ago, I pulled a couple of pads from a plant in someone's front yard and plopped them into a pot of gravelly dirt and basically, forgot about them. This is what they have become. You can barely see the pot they are in.

This is what it looked like last year.

Anywho.....there were some stray Bermuda grass runners all around the pot and that wouldn't do. So I...with my bare hand....stupidly began pulling out the grass. I do this same stupid thing every Spring. And every Spring, I am painfully reminded that hiding in the gravel are the remains of last years Prickly Pear fruit. All withered and shriveled. And completely covered with microscopic 'thorns' called 'glochids.

Glochids are tiny, finely barbed hair-like spines. And they hurt.

I spent most of the evening hours trying to get all those little devils out of my fingertips.

OUCH!

I'm grateful they are gone now.
Mostly.

THE COLOR RED

My witty husband said my first picture should be of the balance of our bank account.

To that, I can only say, thank goodness for our small overdraft protection.

Red will be the most difficult color for me to do, because red is probably my least favorite color. 

I'm talking about red...real red....Marilyn Monroe red...or fire engine red.

Throw a little orange in it...or some blue...and I like it a lot better.

Nevertheless, I was able to find a few photos that are fitting.

Red, of course is one of the primary colors.

Red
Blue
Yellow

Out of those three colors, plus white, all other colors are made.  ALL of them!  Isn't that amazing? 

http://www.colormatters.com/colortheory.html


Anyway...back to red.

Red is the color of valentines, of course.

So, I guess it's fitting that I am featuring this color so close to Valentine's Day.

It's also the color of something I dearly love.

Red Chiles!!!!!!!

Here are some, drying on a roof-top and hanging from the rafters of a shop in Hatch, New Mexico, where the very best red chiles come from!

From these beauties, you can make this.

Yes, that is red...not brown.  And, it is tuly red HOT!!!

You won't find the recipe for it in this.....

but you can find lots and lots of good recipes.  This is my 'go-to' cook book........

this and The Pioneer Woman's website.

http://thepioneerwoman.com/

Be careful, though.  That woman might make us all fat!  Fat, but happy!!!

Speaking of happy....this always makes me feel happy.

It says, 'somebody in Kayenta, Az LOVES YOU!'

My sweet sister/daughter/friend, Samanta gave it to me.

I remember so many happy times with her in my kitchen.  Of course, those glass shelves in my kitchen window with all the colored jars and bottles DOES have one that is red.

I did the 'cartoon' application to this photo because the dust on the shelf was showing in the picture and I didn't want to clean it.

I'm just being honest.

My dear friend, Lori, brought me this fridge magnet when she went on her Alaskan cruise.

And I have this vintage treasure that I got at the swap meet for a quarter.

Our last name is Baker....so, of course, this has a prominent spot in our kitchen!

I couldn't help but take a picture of this old pick-up truck when Lori and I went to Tubac.

And these cactus buds that I saw in the patio at De Grazia's Gallery In the Sun.

While searching through my old photos, looking for 'red', I found this picture I took several years ago of my sweet daughter-in-law's grandfather's old barn. 

See how pink it all looks?  I did a painting from this photograph and gave it to her.  Bless her heart.  I say that, because I slavishly painted exactly what I saw in the photo.  She now has a painting of her grandfather's barn which looks as if it was painted with Pepto Bismol.  I urge her to rip the canvas off the stretcher bars, throw it in the trash and use the wood in her chimenea.  Please?  I beg of you!

I also had this picture of Poppy's barn.

Since that roof is actually red instead of pink, I thought I'd do a timed painting of this picture for today's RED blog.

Here it is.

I don't know what possessed me to do a timed painting of a building, but I'm glad I did it.  Even in this unfinished stage, I think it's better than the first one I  painted of it....in spite of the glaring error in the  proportions of the right side of the barn.

Speaking of buildings, several years ago, while traveling in hubby's 18-wheeler, we came upon this wonderful, old-fashioned country store, in LIKELY, CALIFORNIA.  It reminded me of the store my family had in Roswell, New Mexico.  But we never had such a really neat sign painted on our storefront.

It really brings me back to a time when life was much more simple.

I'll drink to that!

I am grateful for every color in the Creator's rainbow!