How to use this Page

A rare day-off for Lincoln's Birthday, the big kids all gone to friends' houses, and a little sunshine on the front patio means that my littlest can have fun playing out front while mom updates things on the laptop.

Spring flowers have already arrived.

Anyway, didn't I say I might just tweak the painting a little?  Well, that wasn't exactly true.  When it came down to it, I think I tweaked it a lot.  Of course, it may not look different but, with a little close observation, one might notice differences.  Frankly, I became frustrated with the 2 flowers on the right - they became rather muddled by overworking with to many colors - I even completely painted out the bottom one and started over.

I think it's done - but I'm still not happy with the leaf - I'll just tweak it a little...

Light was an interesting challenge as I had a changing light source (a south-facing window) to my left which caused moving shadows and a secondary interior light overhead/right which created shadows of its own.  I realized that I was giving conflicting information with cast shadows of the flower petals on both sides of the vase/creamer, but I liked the shapes and decided to keep them.  And that's what was truly liberating about this project compared with the first one which was much more dependent on observation.  For this one, I gave myself permission to use more artistic license and mostly responded to what was happening on the paper.  Besides liking the shapes of some of the shadows, I also liked the orange from the flowers reflected on the porcelain surface - it wasn't nearly as pronounced in real life, but I liked it in the painting.

I still have dreams of one do doing a "quick" little still life that captures its essence with a minimum of strokes... (sigh)

Add a Comment

For my watercolour classes this week I bought little pots of primulas, one each of white, yellow and pink blossoms. After some general and specific recommendations for colours and composition the real drawing and painting began and I made a discovery about the primulas. They had six or seven petals, every single of them, confounding a rule that I have been presenting to my classes as a reliable and unvarying truth:

Whenever we are painting flowers I point out the difference between monocots and dicots, a handy thing I learned in first year biology. The number of petals in spring bulb flowers is usually a multiple of three and the leaves have stripey, parallel veining. These two features are typical of monocotolydenous (one seed leaf) plants. Dicotyledonous (two seed leaf) plants have leaves with reticulated veining and their flowers usually have petals in multiples of four or five (and it is all well described at this page.) "Usually", and up until this lesson, unvaryingly, but these flowers hadn't heard of the phenomenon or read the text books and instead flaunted their pretty seven-petalled heads at me. "Paint what you see" is a good rule too and the one to follow when theories don't seem to fit.

The important thing is to keep painting, whether following familiar trails or breaking a new path.

Display Comments Add a Comment

Richard L. Revesz is co-author, with Michael A. Livermore, of Retaking Rationality: How Cost-Benefit Analysis Can Better Protect the Environment and Our Health, which makes clear that by embracing and reforming cost-benefit analysis, and by joining reason and compassion, progressive groups can help enact strong environmental and public health regulation. Revesz is the Dean of New York University School of Law. In the article below Revesz responds to an article in the N.Y. Times Magazine.

In the N.Y. Times Magazine, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner discuss three seemingly unrelated stories about a deaf woman in Los Angeles, a first-century Jewish sandal maker, and the red-cockaded woodpecker. The commonality in these stores, the essay argues, is that they were all the unintended victims of well-meaning regulation – the Americans with Disabilities Act, an ancient Jewish law forgiving debts every seventh year, and the Endangered Species Act, respectively. (more…)

Share This

Add a Comment

When carbon-neutral was named The New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2006, the choice highlighted how recent efforts to combat climate change have brought forth a whole new class of carbon compounds (the lexical kind of compounds, not the chemical kind!). To be carbon-neutral, you can use a carbon calculator to estimate your household’s carbon footprint. Then you can seek to reduce your own carbon emissions, or you can purchase carbon offsets or carbon credits. Countries can institute carbon taxes, while eco-conscious companies can engage in carbon trading on the carbon market. And maybe someday, if we’re all low-carbon or even zero-carbon, we can live in a post-carbon world.

Putting aside the politics of the global warming debate, lexicographers are particularly interested in how the usage of the word carbon has been expanding in recent years. Not everyone is happy about the carbon boom. Salon’s advice columnist Cary Tennis recently fielded a letter from “Bothered by Bad Buzzwords,” who complained that carbon-neutral and related terms misuse the word carbon. “What I don’t understand is why no one is calling the concept correctly,” the letter-writer grumbled. “Carbon is not carbon dioxide! One is a black solid. One is an odorless, colorless gas. Couldn’t they call it CO₂ neutral?” (more…)

Share This

Add a Comment