Meri's Musings

Since I'm taking care of my mother after she had her shoulder replaced, I haven't had much time to blog. Life's full of trade offs, isn't it? So here, for your amusement, is the latest issue of Platform58, having the theme "Paint." I've got a piece in there somewhere. I think it's the fifth photo I've had published. No compensation - no glory either. Just bragging rights, I guess. Like I said, life's full of tradeoffs.

I woke this morning to a symphony of rain. It was clattering down, vivace with the resounding clack of snare drums. Then it trailed away, pianissimo. Right now, I think we're entre-act. But the rain has formed diamond drops at the points of the vine maple outside my window and washed away all the words that I had saved to accompany my paintings. So -- without excess words -- here are the paintings in the order that they are meant to be hung (left to right) in a show. As I said yesterday, I think the name of the series is "Personal Truths." Well, actually, I said personal truth yesterday, but today I'm adding an "s" to truth. Because we all have more than one thing that we know in our gut to be true. Any suggestions for individual titles? I'm lusting for titles as rich and interesting as Mary Jane Rivers' series that she called "The Elephant in the Room."

If you've taken Peggy Zehrings's workshops more than once, after the half-day of drawing blindfolded, you're free to mastermind your own abstract series. You have to articulate and write down a purpose, like "exploring form to form relationships" or "investigating the emotional impact of color." Then you write down the steps in the process you're adopting. The only requirement is that you design a process having at least five steps. One of the big challenges of painting abstracts is to create a coherent composition that works while at the same time replicating the authentic nature of the drawings. So I set as my goal just that: to do a series that captured the freshness and truth inherent in the blindfolded drawings. But how can you achieve that authenticity? I've tried to use a blindfold when painting, but it doesn't work very well. Even though you can feel around to make sure you're staying on the canvas,you can't tell when your br...