Demi Demure

Everyone seems to be sick. Yep, it's the winter of colds that never go away, or repeat themselves every other week. I've been feeling pretty superior about my excellent health. And I'm not saying that my attitude of health superiority has resulted in some karmic clobbering, but you won't hear me saying I have escaped the year of the dreaded cold. It's here and I am saying "uncle" with my deeply scratchy voice.

Moo 10" x 30"

Now I think this ol gal really looks like a cow.
Last week I went to a book signing event at A Different Light Bookstore. My pal Justin Early wrote a memoir about being a street kid in Seattle and was in San Francisco promoting his book. I showed up to the reading just in time to hear him read a section about his first meeting me at Walden House fifteen years ago when I worked there. Now that was a blast from the past. I think I should paint goldfish because my mind seems to be similar to one. I recognized none of the people that came up to me to say hello.

Moo Moo 10" x 30"

I finished the cows a couple of months ago but haven't had a chance to photograph them until recently. Cows are surprisingly challenging to render. This pair vacillated between looking like sheep and dogs. When I was in Florida in December I had a chance to pet some cows in a pasture adjacent to a medical building. They were very friendly. When I was a kid in Wisconsin, I rode my bike in the country to and from school and would moo at the cows, and they would pick their heads up and look at me every time...it was very satisfying.

Lil Cruella

I saw some encaustic paintings today by an artist who used loads of wax, and let the wax teeter precariously over the edges causing a very cool drippy effect. I had some practical concerns about shipping, packing, and moving such pieces but that does not come from the part of my brain that is an artist, but rather the part that hates to lose or break things. Normally I'm pretty Zen about paintings. I'll paint over one in a minute if I'm tired of looking at it. And encaustic paintings are very easily repaired if they do chip or crack. But losing my mom seems to have made me a little clingy, even to a disaster fantasy of a strangers art work being broken.

Hair

I tried to write a little in my last post but had inadvertently set my language to Hindi and all my text turned to unrecognizable words and letters. I managed to write the title in English by avoiding the space bar. I was certain I had a virus, rather than remembering that I had clicked "allow translations" in my settings. This is a lesson I seem to have to learn over and over...the first question I ask needs to be "what did I do?" rather than"what has been done to me?" I get to learn this frequently whenever I'm working on anything related to the computer or the internet.

ModCock