Sunday, January 15, 2012

Gardener's blues

Just as swimsuits tend to arrive in the stores just when you are finally in the thick of hat and gloves season, seed catalogs seem to arrive during the part of the year where the ground is either frozen solid or a churning quagmire of mud and rain.

I suppose it makes sense in a certain way -- you'd want everything all ready to go when it's time to plant. This year I am going to do as my gardener here and try my hand at starting seeds inside. I've not much natural light here at Chez Kumquat, so I'm not sure how successful I'll be.

egg cartons

When I was working out the details for this painting I got a little bit obsessed with egg cartons. They aren't a huge point of focus here, but when you abstract and simplify as I do you have to work a lot on how to abstract and what to simplify. I spent almost a week with my big pad of paper and a big paintbrush playing with egg cartons.

I think egg cartons would be an excellent exercise for people just beginning to paint and draw. It's a relatively simple-seeming object (we see them all the time, we scoff and think Oh, this won't be a problem. Everyone knows what an egg carton looks like.) but has a lot of surprising nooks and crannies that don't line up the way you'd expect them too.

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