BAck in P'town!!

The stars, the moon, the sun, two sisters, a mother, a brother in law, two nieces, a nephew, and one daughter were all in perfect alignment this afternoon and I got to come back to P'town to check my mail and post. We are in day 11 of the trip, and home and work - especially the Bronx courthouse - seem very far away. Stan and Chris went home Sunday and we miss them a lot. Jess and her friend went home yesterday, after we practically had to pry them off the beach and into her car. Tonight my cousin is coming with her three kids and the house will be at full capacity.

I am still painting with the gouache and learning a lot about what I don't know about painting. I feel like I could paint for twenty years and only begin to understand how to mix color, how to control a brush, how to depict light and shadow, and how to design a composition. My appreciation for painters has deepened a thousandfold. I have fallen in love with a painter - well her paintings actually, I haven't met her! Like most of the painters that are shown in galleries on the Cape, she works in oils, but the subject of her paintings are interiors, and those have always been my favorite subjects. Her compositions are still lives of lamps and chairs and tables and vases of flowers, but her genuis is in her use of color. The lamp is violet, the Mary Jane shoes piled on the table are bright red, the vase is emerald green. A skirted table sits between two chairs that are blocks of the palest white and barely pink, the lampshade fuschia, throwing a rosy light that breaks into shadows over the soft, upholstered chairs. I want to run my finger through the lime green and lick it off. I want to turn the lamp with the tortoiseshell shade on and off. I want to crawl onto the window seat overlooking the sea with the little boy and his dog and be lit with the same folden light that floods the canvas. I want to paint like her, dammit!

The gallery owner tells me that when this artist works at the gallery, she paints. I beg to know if she is coming in the next ten days, but the owner says no. She agrees with me that I should buy the little painting of the two chairs with the skirted table and lamp. She also agrees with me that it sucks not to have the money to spend on art. She admits that interiors are her favorite paintings also. We bond, but no discounts come my way. Later on at another gallery, I find a painter whose work are very contemporary. Big planes of color make up a bowl of strawberries so photorealistic that I practically bury my nose in the canvas to figure out how he does it. The eye sees, but the mind does not comprehend. Another oil painter (where are the watercolorists that I thought the Cape was known for?) does a grouping of teapots. But these are not your grandmother's paintings of teapots. Each pot is crisply rendered in flat planes of color and light. I am drawn back to it over and over. I feel the urge to lift the orange canteloupe colored pot and pour myself a cup. The painting is almost ten times as expensive as the other artist, and I don't get why, but assume that he is more well-known. I spend about 15 minutes in front of a painting of three peppers on an old, beat up, metal-topped table. I look at how he depicted the metal, the reflection in the table-top, the juiciness of the orange, red, and yellow peppers. I am sated with desire to paint, but manage to prevent myself from flying into the nearest art supply store and loading up on canvases, brushes, paints, and an easel. Thank God.

After we visited several galleries over the weekend, my fervor for painting flared, then ebbed. My arm and hand were going numb at night,and I found myself not wanting to do anything in my journal. After a day of wondering what was going on, I realized that I was depressed - sometimes seeing great works of art is not conducive to making little puddles of paint and lop-sided pictures. But I got over it and picked up the brush and started working hard and trying to see, to really, really see what I was painting. It's another language, not like drawing at all. There are no lines, just shading and color and light.

With my head spinning with color and light, I did go into the art store and buy ten new pieces of pastel paper, all in buff, light greens, dark greens, gray blues, bright blues, and aubergine. The gouache shines like neon on these rich colors and I am off in a painting reverie. Right before I left, I bought a new book, Art Escapes , and it's a fabulous book. I hesitated to buy it because, frankly, I have enough books and I'm tired of seeing the same artists in each other's books over and over again. But this book is by someone who is a painter by trade and she's a fresh voice for me. The book is divided into exercises and they begin with the simplest techniques for keeping an art journal, and end with sophisticated exercises for perspective and design. I am using a lot of her tips, like the one minute drawings, which we were all participating in on the Everyday Matters list, and many other ideas, like framing all your pages, and painting the same scene every day, or painting the same subject in a thumbnail each day, like the sea or the sky.

The best lesson I did from the book was to take a bright yellow, a red, and a blue, and see how many shades of colors you can create from it. The palette of shades created a whole page of delicious summer brights. I've used this palette in almost all the pages I've painted and I am finally beginning to understand color-mixing.

By now you've gotten the drift that this vacation has become a mini-art retreat. I'm writing very little, but trying to keep a narrative journal on the computer (since I can't get on line, I should use it for something!) I have struggled with the watercolors and withe gouache to represent something beyond grade school paintings. I've made some progress and I'm happy with two or three of the little 8X8 pages I've done. I bought a folder to keep the journal cards in, and carry it everywhere along with the waterbrushes and the gouache box. If it's raining or I don't feel like hauling it all with me, I revert to pen and ink, and do detailed sketches that I paint later on.

I won't be on line again till Saturday when we get home. I hope everyone reading this is getting a chance to spend some time alone with whatever drives your passions - whether art, writing, food, golf, sailing, reading - and I'll see you on the weekend!