It’s Embarrassing

Last year I bought a couple new shirts.  As I was ironing them the other day, with a shock I remembered buying two shirts in December 1978 almost identical to these.  For someone who advocates personal change in order to bring about a better world, it’s embarrassing.

 

I keep old clothes like these for messy painting, gardening, cider-making type jobs.  The sleeves got in the way, they were ragged, so I cut them off.

 

The weather outside is frightful but knitting in a warm house is delightful.

 

I bought a new coat and my gloves don’t match.  I decided to make a new pair using the same pattern but changing the colours.  More stuck-in-a-rut-ed-ness?  Is it frivolous to make new gloves just because they don’t match?  They didn’t match my previous coat either, which was given to me second hand.  I found it jarring every time I pulled them out of my pockets.  Oh, these really do not match.  Artistic over-sensitivity?  It takes several hours to knit a pair of gloves.  Dollar stores have them and I would be contributing to some poor factory worker’s betterment somewhere in the world if I bought them.  On the other hand (ungloved for the moment) is it not good to be industrious and creative myself?

 

Like my knitting, my thoughts go back and forth or round and round.

 

I can only hope I have more success at changing my heart than my feathers.

 

Fun in Art Class

We mainly worked with colour and composition yesterday.  This teacher has chosen an environmental theme for her subjects this year.  Last time we painted containers and before that, a pile of newspapers.  This time we chose from photos of beach detritus.

 

 

We analyzed the photo as to which colours were present and in what percentage, then painted just strips of colour in that percentage of a sheet of paper.  Next we painted ordinary pieces of paper in those colours, hopefully in sufficient quantity.  Then we cut or tore these pieces so as to compose.

 

 

Next we chose which one we preferred to paint.

 

 

38x46cm

 

I had to time to do a second one in a small format.

 

 

≈ 10cm square

 

I am not particularly inclined to paint abstractly.  Usually it somehow turns into a flower.  I think this time I avoided that. 🙂

My classmates found my work to be poetic.