My latest paintings were both Christmas presents so I had to wait til their recipients got them before making them public, so here we go now:



My eighth gouache is supposedly a chipmunk. I still struggle with getting my paint to a good working consistency — straight from the tube it's too thick to spread easily, but it feels like when I add any water it instantly goes as thin as watercolour. There's a sweet spot in between that I keep missing.



My 43^rd acrylic is my house, as seen from across the street. You can't see much of the actual house frontage and porch from here, so it looks like mostly garage, but there is enough house back there to live in. Any other angle would be mostly tree, so if I wanted to get the whole building in, this was the best I could do.

Christmas lights.

On my way home tonight, it seemed to me that, this year, a lot more houses are putting up Christmas lights, and doing it earlier. I was really in the mood for them today and it cheered me to see them.

Tea lights.

Many years ago, like before we moved to our current house so like maybe twenty, on a whim I bought a pack of a hundred tea lights from IKEA, along with a few lanterns to hold them. I just really liked the idea of them making a soft pretty light.

I never used them. I was always saving them for a special occasion.

Last night, I read a post somewhere about how things are meant to be used and enjoyed. And how, if you're saving things for a special time, and you notice that a special time never comes, then stop it and enjoy them now. So tonight I have a candle going in front of me For No Reason®. And it's lovely, and it feels good to look at it, and I appreciate having it.

waking from a deep, sound, solid sleep and putting on clean clothes: two significant blessings back to back

getting my headlight fixed — I hate having one out

My 40^th acrylic painting is a chinchilla (as I hope is apparent). I did it back in August, but it was a birthday gift so I couldn't show it publicly til my friend saw it [so as not to spoil the surprise, eh]. I learned a few things while working on this one:

• my ability to handle acrylic paint technically is a bit more advanced than I consciously realized — I was able to do some things here that I didn't know I could.
• for the first time, I tried using a fair bit of drybrush in acrylic. It's a technique I don't hear discussed very often with acrylics, but I found that it came in handy here.
• so many times I have read that it's not a good idea to fuss with fiddly little things in a painting — but for this painting I felt free to ignore that advice, because I knew what final look I was aiming at.
• I noticed in my reference photo that the chinchilla had both white and black whiskers, so I painted on some white ones and black ones. But then I immediately saw that they jumped out, glaring unnaturally. So I went over them with washes til I ended up with light gray and dark gray whiskers instead, and that looked better. This was a good lesson in paying closer attention to actual colours and values, to see what you see instead of what you think you see.

I don't remember how I discovered them, but there's this Swiss indie band on Bandcamp called the blue herons. A few times a year they will record and release a new song, and basically give it away — their sutff is “pay what you want”, even if “what you want” is zero. When I stumbled across them, they had about half a dozen songs out, and I got them all for free.

Eventually I realized that I listened to them so often, and enjoyed them so much, that it was only right that I give something back. So when their next song came out, I volunteered to pay way too much for it, to pay enough for all the earlier freebies. And I've paid for every song since then, more like the price I would expect to pay for any other song. I feel better knowing that I am doing my bit to help support an indie creator.

And for the last few, I haven't even listened to it first, I just buy it and download it as soon as it comes out. We're at the point now where I trust them, cuz they have never let me down. Their periodic reappearance in my inbox is a source of quiet delight in my life.

new hearing aids — my tunes have cymbals again!

Art is expression. Of the self, one's thoughts and feelings and beliefs. It's not just painting a tree, it's conveying what the tree means to you. Art evokes, it suggests, it interprets, it expresses. It doesn't simply take dictation. It makes something that didn't exist before, that couldn't exist any other way. The artist who painstakingly reproduces the world in rigorous and accurate detail and no more, simply because they have the skills to do so, is really no different from a camera. The one who cynically cranks out yet another song or story or painting nearly identical to all their others, in their sleep, simply because they know they can sell it and for no other reason, is not creating art.

Art is in the intention of the creator.

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Art is an experience. The painter creates an experience for the eye, the musician for the ear, the writer for the mind, the chef for the tongue. Some will find the experience engaging, or delightful, or moving [good]; others may find it indifferent or unpleasant [bad]. But, good or bad, it's still art regardless. The pop musician may be up on stage playing their hit for the zillionth time on autopilot, bored out of their skull... but people in the audience are ecstatic because that piece connects with them powerfully, here and now. Norman Rockwell cranks out a painting in less than a week because a magazine hired him to make their cover, and some people dismiss him as a hack commercial illustrator... but next week, and for decades afterward, other people are moved to laughter or tears by the story they see evoked in his facial expressions.

Art is in the response of the audience.

another epic sky