Remember I'm more or less bed bound so all the working space I have is within arms reach to my right which is my bad arm so I have to roll onto that side to get my left arm into play which makes things a bit of a struggle. Also my art materials - some of them, there should be more but I dunno - were just dumped higgly piggly into a box and first had to be seperated and sorted into their categories of brushes, india inks, tube paints and a paintbox. That took me tw days to arrange and then I had to set up a workspace in the shape of a small side table by the left side of my bed.
All well and good but the table blocks my access to the loo and must be able to be moved back from the bed which is a problem with wet paints and water containers for brush cleaning. I can work this out but Tanny takes over any flat spaces for her own use and this complicates matters a bit. However after three days I was able to start painting and though its mentally exhilarating its also energy sapping so after a few hours all I can do is sleep.
This is where the dreams come into the story
Three times a day I take 8 hour tylenol plus a 25mg tramadol for pain and twice a day as well I take my heart meds which tend to make me sleepy.
I'm sure that its the tramadol that causes the dreams because they are almost like short films complete with sound and colour and strangest of all are competely random and have no unpleasantness to them at all. This is in sharp contrast to the demerol they gave me for my appendicitis which gave me such intense nightmares I stopped taking it.
These dreams are happy, they always have familiar elements to them, people or places often incongruously mixed but nevertheless enough to make me laugh and wake up smiling.
Okay now to return to my artwork.
As I'm sure I have mentioned before, my favourite painting technique is to first create a wash background as randomly as I can by flooding the paper and then dropping selected blobs of colour so they spread out like an oil film does on a puddle except that these are water based paints but they behave similarly because the film of water gives them mobility and I never let my brush touch the paper but move the colour film around by moving the paper or blowing onto it to push a colour to where I think it should go.
This technique works well with paintbox tablet colours because they are already well diluted before you can apply them so you get a very diaphanous veil of colur which when it dries will become semi permanant (as long as its not wetted)
So when this background is really dried out I stare at it to see what shapes suggest themselves and theres always something that emerges be it ever so incongruous. I will lightly pencil in the chosen shapes outline and so it goes bit by bit until a picture suggests itself.
Occasionally theres a disaster and i stopped painting the day before yesterday after a spectacular one of those caused by my changing media from tablet paint to india ink which has the most incredible pigment density.
So I will need to make a new set of tools in order to make the most of this stuff which requires super dilution if its to become transparent. Its a medium that is best suited to air brushing but thats out of the question in these circumstances.
Damn, I've run out of steam which is reall ironic because the dream I just had which triggered this post was all about trains and the revelation that playing with O gauge free form on the floor and in between the furniture is much more fun than a fixed layout be it ever so realistic.
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