As we drove through the fabulous Burgundy countryside and villages a few days ago, admiring the scenery, the sky - I saw an upside-down rainbow for the first time and it seemed to have a red "flare" - and the old buildings here and there in little clumps, I wanted to get home and paint but at the same time I was enjoying the ride. We got home really late but I still spent a couple of hours doing this and that - anything except paint - with the notion that starting to paint at that hour was either going to have me miss a night or be frustrated by having to stop to sleep. That was the dissipation.
Also, as we drove through my french ancestral villages, and this is where the temptation comes in, I realised how much I miss writing about these ancestors who I have never met - three hundred years is a bit far back - and know absolutely nothing about except their date of birth, date of marriage and date of death. I know who they were married to and most of who their children and parents and siblings were, but those are just names and dates. The last book I was writing from that époque started in the mid to late 1600's in the now department of Loire and I stopped writing (to work on some paintings and move) around the mid 1700's. Writing about these people and this time is a fascinating journey back in time - as close to time travel as I can imagine getting. I don't just miss writing about these people and this time, I actually miss the people. As I write about them (inventing their stories since I don't know them), I discover who they were. I have no plan other than their pertinent/available dates of information and so as I think of plausible explanations (to me) for why Antoine left the Loire and traveled eighty kilometres to what is now Saône et Loire or why, Léonard, the clog-maker's son would make vinegar and how he managed to marry Madeleine, the daughter of a rich wine merchant, I have to imagine who they might have been. I have done a great deal of online research - thank you Wikipedia and several websites by people who are interested in local history and a couple of 18th Century writers of history - to try to get an idea of life back then. It caused me to have to think about how a clog-maker made clogs and found out that clog-making virtually died in the mid 1800's which might explain the vinegar; and what did women do all day; and what did people die of; and did all the people have their babies taken care of by 'nourrices' in neighbouring villages for the first two years. Where I can find no answers, I invent. So I consider writing to be a distraction from painting, but research is a distraction from writing.
So that's it for dissipation and distraction.
The next temptation is to make a sculpture or construction to put in a large, low, metal plant pot on a tiny corner of the street outside one of our windows. There are flowers in other pots and a sculpture would look nice - theoretically - in the middle of the flowers and bushes. The whole idea gets quite involved once I start thinking about it because I have never done something like this before. I have done thrown plaster, wrapped cloth dipped in plaster, clay, air-drying clay, bent and welded iron rods and chicken wire (that one is in a corner of the yard, rusting and unfinished with bits of the plastic wrapping flapping in the wind), but I have never done something as high, and for outside, as the one I would like to do. So there is the whole "what to use dilemna". Then there is the "do I plan it with sketches and even a miniature" or "do I just get whatever materials and see what happens" question. I like the second idea best but it is so very risky, although the risk is in function of the cost of materials. I probably would not buy and have delivered a huge piece of marble, then just go at it with a hammer and chisel and hope for the best, even if that idea is extremely attractive - but impossible because of the cost of the materials. More on all of that later.
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