Greetings and welcome to another Friday Open Thread with Marko. This week I’ve decided to go against tradition and write a few hours in advance of posting time. Knowing that I’ll be heading out to the country with my family in a few hours and knowing that my internet connection out there is entirely dependent on the whims of the weather, I think I’ll take a moment on a sunny and cold mid-morning in Prague to write a bit and see if I can’t find a few recent photos to share.
The Christmas tree came down in a shower of dry needles this week. The ornaments have been carefully packed and stored away on the top shelf of the hall closet. I took the tree stand down to the basement. One of the highlights of Christmas for me is always the smell of the little evergreen sharing our home for a few weeks. I already miss it-- although, truth be told, I’ve refilled the apartment with piney smells this week.
No, the toilet freshener is lemon.
I’ve decided to start doing some oil paint sketches and I use rather traditional turpentine and linseed oil to thin the paint. I’ve heard of all sorts of other things that people use to reduce the odors I associate with oil painting. There are odorless oil paint thinners or thinners that just smell differently. I once had a small jar of thinner that I sort of inherited from someone. It smelled like orange peel. But turpentine is made from pine resin. That’s Christmas in a bottle.
Not everyone is as happy as I am snuffling through the fumes here. #2 Son is not a fan. I should crack open a window for awhile.
I was thinking that I’d just spend at most two hours on each sketch. I’d like to build a sense of quick, competence with these paints, learn to load my brushes with different tones of color and create both light and shadow with a single flick. I can muddle my muddy way through a painting with fairly respectable results, but it’s a graceless, plodding process. There needs to be flair, panache— life in painting. I want to layer pigments with the confidence of Claude Monet. Over the next few weeks I’ll be creating little challenges for myself and hoping for improvement.
This week’s subject was a small vase of tulips that Mrs. the Werelynx bought on Sunday. I set the vase on a dark green tablecloth which I draped over a chair I’d placed on the table behind it. The light was just the bright mid-morning sun of winter shining low through the window. I gave it about an hour and a half the first day before I quit to get a few other things done. I set the painting and the tablecloth aside for a few days. This morning I got out the painting and tried to give the sketch a more finished look and signed it.
I’m not overjoyed with the results.
I’ve got some idea of where I most need to improve to get the sort of luminous results I wanted. Not sure what I’ll choose for my next subject. I don’t suppose these tulips will still be serviceable on Monday.
I’m expecting a snowy weekend. Hoping to get out tomorrow and Sunday skiing. Our place in the country is knee-deep in snow.
As you can see, we managed to get out the cross country skis. We stomped through the deep snow making our trail out into and through the neighboring fields. We traded off the position of trail blazer and make a small circuit of about a half mile or so then Mrs. the Werelynx took a victory lap while I headed in to get dinner ready. We’d taken some leftover ground beef from tacos we’d made the week before and I had the idea of turning it into a pie along with some boiled potatoes, sweet red peppers and yellow onion in a somewhat spicy crust.
I think it was probably my best creative effort from this last week.
On Sunday we managed to make a few trips around our little trail although the wind the night before had erased about a fifth of it and we had to do a bit more trudging to repair it.
In a few hours we’ll be heading back to see what’s left of the trail and tomorrow we may just be stomping out a fresh one. Sunday we’d like to get in a morning of downhill skiing if we can. This is the first year in a fair few that we’ve had enough snow to tempt us to try the local slopes.
It’s a strange place that I’ve found myself. Things that in America are considered toys of the wealthy like downhill skiing and places in the country are fairly standard for Czechs. Kids take week-long school trips to the mountains to learn how to ski and many families in the cities have a spot out in the country to call their own. Luxury comes standard. Like with great beer and healthcare, I sometimes forget that there was a time in my life when these things were not taken for granted. Both of those things I was sorely aware of lacking when I was fresh out of college in the 1980’s.
So here I sit, a pampered kitty, slightly bewildered and overly blessed.
But my thoughts are with friends and family in the United States, the land where I spent about half of my life, the land of my birth. There’s an inauguration happening in Washington DC. I hear the weather is gloomy.
Thanks for stopping by. Sorry to end this on a dreary note, but these diaries of mine always seem to wander off into the corners. Give me an encouraging kick in the comments if you would be so kind.
In the meantime, it still smells of turpentine and linseed oil around here and should for some time to come.
This is an open thread.