How will I ever get into the Metropolitan Museum of Art? the aspiring young artist asked a great teacher. “You can either take the Fifth Avenue bus to 81st Street,” said the teacher, “or work hard, be inspired, wait 20 years, and have them come to you.
— Leonard and Thelma Spinrad
From the quote box
NaPoWriMo 2019 – Day Five
Don’t you look at those magazine checklists and think – if only it were that simple…
All this confusion is, well, confusing me
I can’t tell anymore: Am I anxious?
Depressed? Angry? Sorrowful? Distracted?
It rises within me, whatever it is
and will not accept a greeting
Hello darkness, I mean, grief, um, you are?
It ignores my hints as I search for just
the right name for this pain and discomfort
If only I can name it, I just know
we could come to terms, be at peace again
A suitable checklist could then be found
I would follow all its suggested steps
The harried night would fall away to black
bangs brushed gently back from a furrowed brow.
Greys – Grays – Got ’em
Got a package via Fed Ex today, rushed from the heart of Dick Blick. They didn’t want me to wait until the twenty-second as indicated when I’d placed the order. Five new paints – all greys/grays/sorta-grey.
I had just enough time to try these out on a bit of Arches hot press 140 and I knew I should have found some cold press instead. But here you go, joined by five other greys I already had and, in the middle, the common mixed grey of french ultramarine and burnt sienna. All Daniel Smith except for the one, noted as Holbein.
The new ones were pretty non-granulating compared to the others, at least on this paper. I think the grey titanium will be useful.
NaPoWriMo 2019 – Day Four
Not sure this is it for today, but the suggestion was for a sonnet about sadness. Although I’ve found a few lines in the past few days of iambic pentameter it wasn’t happening for me today at lunch! And then at the last minute:
“She didn’t listen to a thing I said”
what a jolt to the man’s nervous system.
With all the world’s bleak incivility
there’s room to find in the heart’s recesses
a space for kindness or at least, manners
enough to hold your tongue and baser thoughts
If that made him angry, it makes me sad
to expect blind compliance, to obey
the old structures that have served him so long
that keep him bound as much as those beneath
until an unexpected slight shows him
the unreality is all his own
She listened no doubt with her own sadness
and shaking her head moved on without him.
Today’s Paint
I thought I’d be sitting down below this view, where there’s a nice bench. It was so windy I had to stay in the rocking car and had to roll up my window a few times because the wind kept blowing in dust!






