Rescue Me in the Month of Fresh Starts

Pansies in a blue glass vase

Acrylic ink, watercolour and black marker

on watercolour paper

5.5 x 8.5 inches

Barbara Muir © 2018

One thing you might not know about artists is that we
don't like waste.  We especially dislike wasting our own
work. That's why this former watercolour (now watercolour
plus acrylic ink) painting was bothering me each time I
looked at it.   It's in the pad of watercolour paper I've
been using for my pansy paintings.

Ta Da! (Trumpet sound!), today I worked on it.
Not sure it's 100% better, but it has some of the depth
and richness pansies deserve.  I keep talking about the
weather, and I hope you don't find that irritating, but it
is quite cold here again.  I am certainly getting my wish
for a prolonged spring.  And my poor pansies outside
are struggling.

Looking for this painting on my blog before the fix I
found nothing. It never made it into publication, poor thing.
What I did find was soooooooo many pansy paintings.
Clearly a passion.  So accept it please.  The obsession
was planted ( ;-) by my mother, and a wonderful art professor.

I also found this discussion about how we artists think.
I'd met a lady walking my dog back in 2010 who said that
I was lucky I was a painter, because I had something to look
forward to.  (Rule #1 for artists, never reveal the total dread we
sometimes feel going into the studio to try and finish a
piece.)  And I wrote this in response to her remark.

"This statement confused me at first, and I walked
down the path overwhelmed with the thought --
what?  But the truth was so far from that sentiment
that I might have required a full orchestra and a movie
crew to describe it.  Yes I do have something to look
forward to.  I realized as that phrase washed in and out
of my brain that I really, really do!  For instance on
that walk, each flower, each leaf, each shade of green, and 
brilliantly coloured stem, the sky, the other dogs, people 
like the woman I met on the path, every single bit of it was
 something to look forward to.In fact each day, despite the 
odd bit of fatigue, and sadness for others, and bone weary sorrow
 over the world's ills, and some of our tendencies to not want to
see them, is so filled with things, events, joys, songs, laughter,
love and detail, detail, detail, all absorbing -- that the very phrase
 left me gobsmacked. "

Have a loving each detail day!