A Southern Colours Project - 3

Every Friday is a Southern Colours day. We gather from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. to paint together, share related art news, exciting new techniques, what's going on with local shows, who has won awards, and check out everyone else's work, usually beginning with a line-up of works-in-progress offered for critique. My painting isn't quite ready for a critique since so many parts of it haven't progressed beyond the block-in stage. That doesn't mean that several of my cohorts didn't wander past and offer helpful comments. It's part of what makes Southern Colours so special.

I worked on the base of the lamp all morning. Those of you who are not artists might wonder how it is possible to spend an entire morning painting a lamp base that's approximately 12 inches tall and 2 inches wide. I have done entire paintings in less time but I have chosen a difficult subject in this case. I don't want it to look like a photgraph but it has to be rendered correctly and therein lies the challenge. Refine, refine, refine, and refine again until nothing looks obviously wrong.

I think I'm at the point where one more session will finish the lamp base. Notice that I have done a tiny bit of work on the first crystal. We've had a temperature drop. It will be 85 to 90 degrees rather than 95 to 98 degrees during the day. Now I have to decide between working on this painting tomorrow and attacking the weeds that are thriving in the garden while all of our desirable plants curl up and die.

Meanwhile, it's Sunday and my family is hoping I'll make a dessert to go along with our traditional Sunday dinner. I'm thinking it will be blueberry pie from the wonderful blueberries my friend, Faye, brought from her mother's Habersham County farm. Faye's mother, Clara, puts me to shame. She's gardening in the same 95 degree heat that I'm always complaining about and sharing her bounty with grateful hangers-on like me.