Somewhat furtive

Well amazingly I haven't been completely slacking off recently. Although the weather has been sickeningly beautiful and i've spent an hour here or there sitting on the front porch listening to a relay of chirrups as the birds run around.

This is the stream that runs beside the house...There's no easy way across but you can get yourself down past the little waterfalls and sort of hunker....hunkering's only fun for 30 minutes though.

Front porch bit where I tend to sun worship

Then this morning, a walk which was meant to be half an hour went on for 2 hours and involved me sinking into a mossy pit with my Converse on...It was a very squelchy walk home, and unfortunately the shoes are ruined for good, although I always think bashed up shoes look better, the smell can be off-putting.

In any case I had a very last minute bit of painting to do for something...I went through several stages of 'Oh this is awful, I am terrible, what the heck am I doing' this time because it was very last minute and because what began life as a small study had to become a real finished thing....I also went wildy off-track with my usual composition..


This was a very definite 'what on earth am I doing' moment...I was presumably channeling the cover of some Funkadelic album here.


Some agonising took place, and some adoration of Henri Rousseau


Mexican Relics? I liked the old beat up clock door I was using as a frame, but in actual fact my biggest problem became my ambition to fill this much space...As it turns out I can probably paint a flower a day, half a bird or 2 butterflies. So I had to cut the length of the frame down, lose some of the painting i'd already done, but at least I managed to finish it.

A bad shot, night time, 30 minutes ago. I'm happy actually with where this went, it's quite different in composition to my usual preference, but I do like the direction. Being under pressure is unpleasant in many ways because if i'd had the chance i'd have doubled the length of this piece, but then I probably would never have done anything like this without it....So all in all, a good thing.