That wan light of early spring, and that sense of incipient burgeoning.

When Mom was a refugee in Bavaria after WWII, she got a job painting peasant motifs on traditional ceramics. I have some of those jugs, filled with history and in this case, spring flowers. 

Another one of those Thursday evening paintings, on unprimed pressboard. I see that the poppies open up during the day, but they were closed in the evening when I did the painting. If you ever want to brighten up a meadow, plant these things! I transplanted one of them about 15 years ago, and now they've spread over about three acres, here and there. The other plant that does this is oregano. Everything else needs to be irrigated or coddled in some way, but not these! The yellow plants in the painting are leopard's bane, another trouble-free flower.

My friend and I spent Thursday evenings painting or drawing on my front porch. I normally work from photos, which don't wriggle around, but sometimes it's fun to see what happens in a less controlled environment. I used that brown pressboard, unprimed, because I like the gloomy evening feel that it gives, as it sucks up the paint so thirstily.

Naked City in Seattle, where I've had a month-long one-woman show on a vast wall for several years now, has closed. It wasn't me. Bryan had a baby and I guess he for some reason thinks his family is more important than my needing a venue.

So now I'm looking for another place to show. 

Painting requires vast amounts of unstructured time, or at least for me it does. I need to dink around, poke and marvel and shudder and generally let life wash over me unfiltered. If I had my druthers, I'd just moon around all day and paint all night.

The business side of it is completely opposite. I just bought a high-end printer, for example, and am FINALLY getting my records in order. I have three-ring binders that my dad fished out of a dumpster 50 years ago, stamped with "Tuborg Beer." I remember him coming home triumphantly, the back of his VW beetle crammed to its white-fabric ceiling with his find. My sisters and I all keep our records in tidy rows of those blue binders, yay for Tuborg! I now have one for paintings from 2017-18 and one for 2016, and will probably be able to complete another one before I have to buy another tranche of ink. This requires square thinking. Lists, checkmarks, strategy and tactics. Accounting.

But venues? Right now, I'm on a very isolated island, teaching in the teeny tiny public school here. It's off the grid, cell phones don't work, and there are no stores. There is a private ferry service, but it runs during the week and I work during the week so I've been here since January, with only one trip off-island to take my dog to surgery. I took the stitches out myself rather than take another day off work and pay the stiff boat fare. 

End of June, I move back to Lopez Island, which is also remote, but not quite so isolated. I can get to Seattle from there in less than a day's worth of travel. So, probably this summer I'll make multiple trips into the Big City to try and find another place to show my work. 

I'd rather paint and moon around.