On to Painting
So we are going to skip all those amazing drawings I was lying about last time and move directly to painting. In class we use Winsor-Newton water-soluble oil paints. According to our teacher, they are no different from regular oil paint, except they have an emulsifier that allows them to be mixed with water, thus avoiding the use of toxic and brain-damaging turpentine or turpenoid, whatever that is. We have been painting for three sessions now and we use two colors: raw umber and titanium white. Then we mix the color scale so we have seven tones. That’s our palette.
At first it was quite unhandy to have paint flopping all over the place, but I had a nice time with it all during the last class so now I am painting at home. The teacher gave me his ball to paint. I think we all know I like that.
This is the first go-over that I did this morning. The paint takes a while to dry, although apparently this brown dries faster than other colors; anyway I don’t really need to wait for it to dry to go over it again, it’s just that I am tired of it and all that. So having most of the paint in my palette left over I went ahead and launched into a painting self-portrait. This is just to block in some of the light and shade and try to get the shapes in the right place.
Moving on to me, occasionally lately I have had very vivid memories, usually when I am falling asleep or waking up. This morning it was of a time when I was driving down Wilson Lane in Bethesda, Maryland, going toward River Road on the way to school on a hot spring morning. Everything was humid and green and those thousands of birds and bugs and whatever were going like crazy, and I had the windows open on the old green Chevy station wagon, and all that soft air was blowing in. This must have been senior year, because I had that feeling of excitement and jolly fun that pervaded that time; anyway in the memory I went driving by the dentist’s house with the white sign out front, and around the bend down to the little turn-on leading into River Road, and looked over my shoulder at traffic, and went on to school, with all the green trees and the big hill ahead on River Road rising up in the distance, and turned into school with everyone else and parked down in Senior parking, I think that was gravel, wasn’t it? and went up to school to meet my friends and roister around in Assembly and all the rest of the day, because we didn’t care about anything anymore, and were just having a good time. Well, now I am going to forget all about that except insofar as it is still being lived in the cells of my body–reader, do you get the feeling I am getting weirder all the time?