Before the Deluge

Today, I kept thinking of that song by Jackson Browne to which I used to sing along in my naive youth. I called this post by that name because yesterday, before the deluge, before the disaster, the crash, the collapse of hope, I was still enjoying painting this still life of flowers in a vase from my Roseville collection.

The Roseville pattern here is "Columbine," which came in earth-tones like this one and also in blue-greens (I have a smaller vase with that color combo). The roses and asters and stalks of lavender are from what's left of my garden.

I would just like to say that roses are perhaps the hardest flowers to paint, with the possible exception of peonies, and although you wouldn't know it to look at them, I slaved over these for quite a long time! Asters are so much simpler, as is lavender.

I struggled with whether or not to add a "base" (a table-top, a longer shadow) under/behind the vase, but I really liked how the stencils were showing through the glaze of paint, so I made a smaller shadow than would probably be cast, but at least it "grounds" the vase.

"Columbine and Asters"—stencils, pencil, and acrylics on thin birch board, 12x16 inches.

Some of them were dreamers

And some of them were fools

Who were making plans and thinking of the future

With the energy of the innocent

They were gathering the tools

They would need to make their journey back to nature

While the sand slipped through the opening

And their hands reached for the gold ring

With their hearts they turned to each other's hearts for refuge

In the troubled years that came before the deluge.

Revenge Art

Today, as part of a "Let's Face It 2025" prequel, there was a fun lesson with Deanna Strachan-Wilson, collaging a Dia de los Muertos character. We prepped a black ground on a toned tan background, and then we were supposed to find an old painting we could cut up and use as the basis for our character. I pulled out my big stack of portrait faces and found one that was perfect for this exercise. It was painted in bright-colored inks in Deb Weiers-style, so it was a good base image, but there was another reason...

This woman is a writer and internet personality whose portrait I painted before I ever met her, simply because I found her face both beautiful and intriguing. Then, by a quirk of fate, I invited her to speak at a class I was teaching, and she misrepresented herself, lied by omission, maligned me, and continued to make rude and denigrating remarks afterwards on Twitter that riled up my class about something that wasn't true, garnering me the first bad evaluation I had ever had in my teaching career. So today, I was happy to give her black-ringed eyes, chalk white cheeks, and skull teeth. She doesn't really deserve the crown of flowers, but that's part of the costume, so I grudgingly glued them on.

I'm going to call this exercise a symbolic burying of my ire and my bad experience once and for all.

"La Cabrona," pen, watercolor, gesso, acrylic, collage papers, on tan cardboard, 9x12 inches.