#27 Tomato Tango 2/6/19

Had to take a paint hiatus.  Quilt duty called, my deadline for finishing my son Joe's quilt top was Monday and I made it by the skin of my teeth.  It turned out beautiful.  I dropped it off at the quilt-lady's house (she's got a long-arm quilting machine, and can turn around a quilt in a week).  If you had known me several years ago, dropping a quilt top off to be quilted by someone else AND quilted by machine, well it was just out of the question.  But life changes.  I am willing to make concessions.  And Carol, the quilt lady, does beautiful work.  It should be ready in time for my road trip to Michigan....a perfect time to sit and stitch the binding.

But while I haven't allowed myself to paint during the quilt-push, I did read some more of Carol's (the daily painter lady) book.  This chapter was tough to take.  She described the quintessential new painter.  And she described me: stingy, fussy, oblivious to a soft edge, refusing to clean the brush in between colors, etc.  I sort of wanted to cry.  But I'm post-menopausal, so the crying didn't happen.  Today was my day to get back on the horse.  I painted these tomatoes in like 10 minutes.  Take that Carol Marine!  I tried Carol's method: draw it with brown and then wipe it dry; do the subject first, not the background; find the intense color, put that down first, then the shadowy part, then the reflected parts, then the casted shadows, then the background, and at the end put in the bling (the highlights and stems).  Boom, done.  Messy looking, but quick....and it has much more of the "painterly" quality that Carol describes.  The brush-strokes are visible and I left them alone.  No paper-towels today.