Sliding through January

 You must be kidding

Skype sketch

black marker on bond paper

Barbara Muir © 2011

Did you know -- of course you did that today would have been
Cezanne's 172nd birthday, which would have garnered him
title of oldest painter on the planet.  I have to admit I'm
a fan of Cezanne.  When Cubism hit him, he did exciting
things with it.  And I think he was almost as famous for
his fruit paintings, as the great Dutch still life painters.
But alas. Ah for the benefit of my feminist friends our own
Emily Carr (Canadian) was pretty great with a kind of
Cubism too.  Hers was more lyrical and organic than
angular.  Check it out.

Did you also know astronomers and astrologers calculate the positions
of the planets differently so that your horoscope could be one
month off due to something called earth wobble? Would that
make me a Libra or a Saggitarius?  I felt deliciously happy
to have given up all belief in horoscopes after watching the
movie Religulous when I read about that story.

In Toronto today a flash freeze after some rain made the
road so slippery that anything was possible.  I watched a
Cadillac SUV do a triple spin on black ice, and quickly
altered my driving route home.  (The Cadillac was safely
on its way don't worry.) Thank you to Flora Doehler for
recommending icers, which I put on my feet when I was walking
from my car to the school, and which let you walk across
glare ice without falling.

We get so tied up here with weather -- the pursuit of warmth,
the tense driving which makes your neck ache, that we do need
a little nap, a really good book and sometimes to practice an
image a few times before committing it to canvas.  I am in that
frame of mind today.  Let my hand slide across the page
measuring and measuring, in the sweep between hand and eye
to try and get the proportions of a face I'm painting just right.
You do it, I do it.  By the way two great paintings to check out
today are the entries of the International Women Celebrate
show in Ayr Ontario in March by Marcia Labelle and Nicki
Ault. I am getting more excited by the minute about seeing
all the magnificent work in that show hung together.  And
I hope that by March we'll have warm weather, and no snow.

My mind is sliding towards sleep, but before I go here's
a little Skype portrait sketch I did tonight.  It is not the subject
for my painting, but it is a happy image for me of a great
talk with some dear friends.


Have a sliding-towards-joy day. 
(And if you fall, I hope it's only to fall in love.)