Today was just too full of mishaps and hilarity when Adele and I went to paint outside at the Norfolk Botanical Gardens. First, we had to load up, get there, get coffee, make a trip to the bathroom and then scout for a spot to paint. This all takes forever...all the while we both are thinking...the light, the light...it's going to change...hurry. So, finally we found a spot.
Adele set up quickly and for some unknown reason, I couldn't get one of the legs on my French easel to unscrew. I mean that I literally ripped my fingertips trying to get this sucker to work. No dice. Finally Adele came over...she couldn't do it either. I eventually gave up and decided to paint with the easel cocked down it the front. It looked and felt like a sinking ship. Strike one.
Adele, it her very calm voice, then tells me that there is a cute "little snake" swimming merrily across the pond. Great...I HATE snakes. Strike two.
We paint some more and fall into the place where many artists go when working furiously. You know...that coma place when time stops and you forget where you are and then suddenly you realize that 2 hours has passed and it seemed like ten minutes. Loosely, in the back of my mind, I heard the tram operator speaking over her microphone, "and see the artists over there painting our lovely flowers..."
I felt like a monkey in a zoo.
When we took a break from all of this we laughed and cackled about how horrible our paintings were, how it just wasn't working, how difficult it was to work here, how messed up our values were, how wrong the colors were...terrible paintings.
Strike 3, 4 and 5.
We ate lunch and said that we would wipe the paint from the canvas, pack up and try to salvage the day and take some decent photographs. Which is what we ended up doing.
So- I have nothing to show you for my day's work!
The sad thing is that a lovely woman with several children stopped and raved in front of her kids about my lovely painting. She went on and on and the fact that I had already wiped all of the paint off was lost on her.
I am sure that it all looked better "fuzzy" and "wiped" rather than how I had originally painted it.
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