I have been painting a lot but not posting at all because I paint by day and write by night: therefore no time for a blog post.
Let's see, what has been happening lately?
I finished two paintings today. One is a woman and the other is a paint meandering. They are visible on Instagram.
I have decided to get my act together and get an exhibition up and running here in the village and/or in Paray-le-Monial and/or in Cluny. If it is an 'and' situation, then I will hopefully be able to stagger them over the course of six months or so, starting in February or March 2020. I am therefore preparing a series of smaller paintings for the village exhibition that I can also exhibit in the larger towns along with some of the larger work. All I have to do on Tuesday is walk the fifty steps to the town and get the necessary information. This will mean pausing the painting (sooooo difficult), grabbing the list of questions and getting to the town hall when it is actually open. I have made several attempts: on several Mondays and Wednesdays when it was closed and on several days when it was closed for lunch or already closed for the day. I have a knack for picking a time when it is closed. It's a gift!
I was sent an invitation to participate in a competition and have to send in some pictures by the end of October this year. Tomorrow, I will be selecting three paintings to photo and send. Quite exciting, whatever the outcome.
I have started the construction of the sculpture that is to go by the side of the house on a little floral patch. I bent the metal rods as needed and shaped a person with chicken wire. The next step will involve planting three stakes into the ground through the bottomless container (it has rusted away), leaving enough of the stakes above the ground to encase in concrete, hoping the whole thing will prevent the higher-than-expected-structure from toppling over at the first hearty gust of wind. Once the base is secured, I will (with much needed help) place the construction on the base and pour more concrete to (I hope) firmly hold it in place. Once all that is done, it'll probably be winter and the whole thing will be rusted and useless by next spring. Nononononono! Once all that is done, I will start the plaster and cloth layers that I hope to water- and weather-proof as seen on Youtube. If only I could remember how it was done. Drats! now I will have to go and look for what I found last time.... I was hoping to do the plaster part before moving it so that I did not need to protect anything, but it would be too massive and heavy to carry. If this all fails for some reason, plan B is to construct a totem pole of symbols representing all the places I have lived in. It would make a fat or a tall totem pole. I'm not even sure if 'totem pole' is the right term for it.
And then there is The Book. The current version that I am working on is in french and mainly from the perspective of the women in the family. It starts in this region in 1753, when my ancestor, who arrived in the region from what is now the Loire department, I am guessing about ten years earlier, meets his future wife. I have only got about twelve pages done and it gets to 1774. I have to invent based on marriage, birth and death records and I keep being interrupted by the need to check dates. Things will get more interesting when I get into the mid to late 1800's because more information is available and also because I can use stories I heard about those ancestors. There will still have to be more invention than fact. The early 1900's are when fact will supersede fiction because by then there are newspaper clippings, family stories and official documents around which I can then embroider to tie them all together. I feel compelled to start when I do simply because I know their names and at least factual dates and movements about them. For instance, I know that one of the children was born in Viry where he was christened and registered in the parochial records - because of flooding - and then he was re-christened and re-registered in the parochial records of Vendenesse, where his family lived. No computers back then and so nobody would have known about this unless the two priests met and thought to talk about babies they had christened.
I am also involved in the much less interesting task of making an outfit for myself for a wedding in three weeks. That project is neatly folded, unfinished and 'forgotten' unless I see it and think 'uhoh! I better finish that' as I walk away. I will most likely finish it in a panic during the eight hour drive to where the wedding is going to take place. Nononono! I can do better than that! The big problem really is that I'm not sure I like it so it is a little unenthusiasticising. I'm sure there's a better, actual real word, but I can't think what it is at the moment so that one will do.
That's it. Finished. For now.
Comentários