Norfolk Botanical Plein Air with Adele

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.

Coffee by Richard Diebenkorn

I don't usually write about work that I have see in museums or galleries. But I was so enthralled by this oil painting that I simply couldn't pass up the opportunity to say something. This painting, 67x58 is an oil on canvas hanging at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk. Richard Diebenkorn is an American artist 1922-1933. I googled him and read all kind of stuff by various experts on the stages of his work. Some wrote that his figures were not nearly as good as his later work, some wrote that his move away from abstract expressionism was ground breaking. I have always felt that artwork should speak for itself and not have endless dialogue to explain. A friend and I were talking today about an exhibit that he once attended and the artist had insisted that all work shown be devoid of title, price, commentary, medium or any other notes. Now that's work speaking for itself. The size of this work and the light on the shoulder from upper right is fascinatingly rendered. This work is distilled and ground down to some very basic elements. The colors are vivid and perfectly placed, yet still show such a spontaneity and fluidness that I find myself entranced. I know this place and this familiar man.