Distracted

Distracted - that's me.  I've never been especially good at keeping a razor sharp sense of focus, and now that notes in the mail - the postal sort of mail and the electronic sort - keep arrive telling me about deadlines for artwork, year-end dinners, meetings for groups, and so on, I find myself losing track.  This is despite two or three calendars and piles of small notes to myself.

There is is nagging feeling, am I losing it?  This week I had an event on all my calendars for Friday evening.  I did my hair and actually applied lipstick, and with my coat on looked once more at the invitation, only to see that the event was scheduled for Wednesday night.  Of course the invitation only listed the date, not the day of the week, or I might have caught my error  earlier. 

All dressed up and nowhere to go except the reclining chair in front of the TV news, to eat carryout pizza.  I guess it could be worse.

I recently paid fifty cents for this little snapshot, bought because I liked the way the child's attention was called away from her mother and the two dogs.  Did someone call her name from inside the screen door?  I like the mystery of it.  I also like the symmetry of the image, the mother with the large dog (a boxer?) and the child with the small spaniel.

I decided to try painting the image on a spare 11x14 inch canvas.  I gessoed over an old acrylic painting, covered the canvas with gray acrylic, then drew in the figures with charcoal.  After spray fixing the drawing, I used soft gel medium to adhere bits of wallpaper from a sample book and some decorative papers I bought on a trip to Italy.  The entire thing was coated with clear gesso, to create a ground for further painting.

After that, it was a matter of using oil paints to create the image.  It's not so easy to see here, but I painted thinly so that the designs and floral elements from the papers peek through a bit.  If I had been smarter I would have added the underlying papers first, then drawn over them.  I guess we learn a little something every time we try a new technique.  I'm not sure if the background colors will stay as they are.  The pink in the upper right was supposed to echo the pink roses in the wallpaper, but it attracts too much attention for my taste.

I think I'll let it sit and dry for a while, then see if I want to change it any more later.