But thirty years of the same pattern is long enough. Wouldn't you say? Time for a change.
But I cannot find anything nearly so good. And I've looked at thousands. No exaggeration. I looked at all the places that specialize at this sort of thing and I kept seeing the same things over and over and over end over end over Andover Andover until my eyeballs went out of their minds.
Why don't I just draw something and have it printed as they do? That's still an option.
I drove to Breckenridge just to have a slice of the worst pizza on earth. Along the way I took hundreds of fairly good photographs. One that I like that was taken with a wide angle lens shows a copse of Aspens in Spring. In large size the photographs looks like you can walk right into it. Less so printed on canvas. It's hanging in the bathroom so you have something to look into when you're standing there making a wee. If you're a dude. And that could account for why I have to keep cleaning that area so inordinately often.
I wanted the shower curtain to create sort of a theme without being overt about it. I wanted the curtain to suggest a forest, not be one. It should be the same palette of tones.
No luck.
I bought one that came close and I've hated it from the beginning. The vertical stripes are actually dentine and do not suggest tree trunks similar to the photograph. Fail.
So I abandoned that idea. The new curtain must go.
Instead, I'll go opposite the color tones. From green, white, tan, and brown with black flecks, to white with red and black.
The old-new one with varied green and tan vertical dentine stripes looks horribly old-womanish. Something picked out for a nursing home. Gawl!
This one is feminine. No it's not. Yes it is. No it's not. Yes it is. Whatever. Hopefully it brightens up the space. When you're sitting there making do.
8 comments:
This one is feminine. No it's not. Yes it is. No it's not. Yes it is.
You already know it's feminine and masculine and are funnin' with us. You haven't yet figured out that it's both.
Funnin'. Clueless. Funnin'. Clueless
I'll guess funnin', or else intuitively aware of the balance of both, as it's also present in the composition of the beautiful and inviting picture taken of the copse of Aspens in Spring!
Thirty years?! Okay, maybe this question will show what a slob I am, but how do you keep a shower curtain from getting black spotted for thirty years. My Dollar Store shower curtains are good for a season, and I don't mean a year I mean a season: summer, fall, winter.
As the Egyptians who were into preservation could attest, deep blue, blood red and tan covers a lot of decline and decay!
ricpic, it's actually two curtains. The liner is very thick also. Impregnated with anti-mildew. And weighted! It's very easy to clean by spraying cleaner on it then rinsing it off with the shower.
But that was replaced too. Eventually they poop out.
MamaM, I was going to say it looks like a feminine picture painted by a dude. As they do. Sometimes, bold black strokes with a globbed up big fat paintbrush then the entire painting done with only one dipping in ink, getting fainter and fainter as it goes along. So it's planned carefully by hundreds of iterations, until finally they do it in their sleep. Just whip 'em out one after the other. Then little birds and flowers dotted in.
Once I saw a western painting of a kitten on an old wooden porch. The entire house is painted in painstaking detail. Peeling paint, nearly bare wood, the detail in the wood is extraordinary.
Then the kitten is brushed in with just a few careless brushstrokes. A mere suggestion of a kitten.
And your eyes go straight to cat.
Because it's the only thing that's alive in the painting.
Same thing here.
The branches are painted skillfully, if quickly. Jerking the brush as it's pulled downward, going this way and that for random branches. After a couple hundred of those you get pretty good at making branches.
Then the birds are just flickity-flick flick.
And they are the things that your eyes go to.
Aspens in the shower makes me think of my friend who does glass design in Denver.
Here - some etched aspens.
Your description captures essence. Much clearer and more alive and flickity-flick than the ponderous path of explanation I was going down.
Yes. To the only thing that's alive in the painting, to where the eyes go. Another Yes to making a change and choosing something different that holds its own.
I mostly get where I want to go in my own paintings by virtue of persistence and the blessing of serendipity. The encouragement I received this fall to try painting the same scene/subject three times was helpful. Although I've not yet made it to three, with a new subject interesting me more than a third try, I've completed several doubles with more confidence, competence and freedom the 2nd time around. As with the practiced-over-time formation of the tree on the shower curtain, the chance of a free bird showing up with a place to land continues to increase.
In the tree photo, the two green pines, one short, one tall, growing up in the midst of all that black and white and tan uprightness, and the hillock on the left both invite and reveal the presence of grace in order.
Dicken'--that is lovely. Something I would enjoy in my own home.
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