Painting and the election
Posted by markhwebster on November 18th, 2020 • 0 Comments
It is squash season and we found a great one in Leavenworth. None of my squash paintings have ever sold (one exception) so I decided to paint 24 x 36″. I’m operating under the go big or go home principle. I painted for 5 hours the last three days and made some good progress. I’m not sure where I’m at with it. On the one hand, it’s well drawn, and it’s big…so there’s that. But the composition and colors could be better.
The challenging part of being a rusty painter is that nothing I do can be good. I can’t jump start my talent with will power. It takes time and practice. By nature, everything I paint will be a train wreck. And yet, the only way to get better is to paint train wrecks…a lot of them.
I could post my work on Instagram, where 20 artists would like it. And that would be my “pay”. But I like to think that I’m smarter than that. Van Gogh didn’t have social media. He got good because he believed in the process.
We bought Nokian Hapelitta R3 tires for our truck today. Now it’s as stable as our studded RAV4. I didn’t want to put the darn thing in the ditch during a snow storm. It’s painful to invest in rubber…but that is the nature of owning cars: you have to maintain them. And a new one has to be brought up to snuff. Now it can go anywhere, snow or not.
Biden may have got elected and there is a lot of celebration on the news. Trump did a few good things I didn’t know about. Clint says he got money for the National Parks.
But his extremely bad speaking style made him seem far more of a monster than he really is. With Trump as the face of America it was very hard to feel any patriotism. As soon as Biden was elected this showed up on youtube. I haven’t felt a speck of patriotism in years…but this made me feel some tingles:
It puzzles me why we couldn’t find anyone better than Biden. I mean, with all those younger politicians, isn’t there someone who could have risen to the top? Kamala is amazing. She has it going on. And perhaps Biden does too. It’s just hard to get excited about him. Nevertheless, at least he seems to have integrity, and his speaking style is ok…lightyears ahead of Trump.