Late December, 2011

Now THAT, I bet you’re thinking, is a REAL DISASTER! This is what it looks like when I have worked so hard at something that is not working that I take a risk and ask for opinions – and the opinions so crush my desire even to try, that I sabotage the whole entire thing from stem to stern.

I had the idea, this December, of trying to paint something for my brother in law, who had had a really rough couple of years. His family grew up going to the Keys for vacation, and his parents remember it when it was almost pristine, undeveloped, undiscovered. I looked online for photos of Bahia Honda beach, where his sister said his happiest childhood memories might have been formed. I found a photo that I really liked, just of water and sky and ribbed sand visible through clear lavender-y water. I wanted the view to be utterly peaceful and unconstraining, and it seemed like a perfect shot. So I began. I had gotten about 1/3 of the way through when my mother visited, and I invited her and her friend, who grew up in the keys, to see my progress. They both told me that the photo couldn’t be of bahia honda, the colour was all wrong. The water in the Keys was a particular colour and that wasn’t it! (At this point, the painting looked like something recognizable, if not Bahia Honda.) I took their advice and used other photos of the water colour to mix a better colour for mine – but nothing was working, and I had already used soooooooo much paint, that I got angry…. I scraped off all the paint and put it in little piles – this pile was once sky and cloud, this pile once sand, this pile once reflecting water, this pile once water you could see it. I blended each pile into itself until they were all their own manifestation of dun gross grey. Then I spread it all about the painting in whatever style / pattern / form I wanted to. It started looking like a beach again, at dusk, my least favorite time of day – in a storm, through tears…!

The colours look to me like throwing up at Howard Johnson’s, after licking some mustard off McDonalds’ floor. But I bet you the time will come, someone will tell me this was always their favorite.