Um.

Took a bit of a break. Got a little reluctant.
But then the daylight got saved and the thaw came down, and I remembered my apetite for showing and telling and I wanna show and tell a few things.

First, MY things.

I took some shots of what I've been up to within my stripe-wild room, as well as outside of it. Yesterday was the first day in a while that felt warm enough to run extension cords and withstand splinters in bare skin, so I hauled my haul outside for a some long, loud hours of sanding. Hand sanding, block sanding, orbital plug-in sanding. The orbital sander is a crucial part of my makin' and breakin' process- it gives me great powers of subtraction, invents texture and time, and shoots me forward into the next phase of painting: putting back details that I shouldn't have taken out after I get carried away and let it veer out of control all over the surface.

Here are some of my fragments and sentences outside, next to the rake and the hose and the recycling (not pictured).



And here's half of a divided woodpecker, finally maturing and showing his grain but still in need of lotsa adding and subtracting.


And some nature, getting all up on my stuff.


Back inside, I'm excited about a starling that's excited about a ripe, spilled-open fig.

This is another piece I'm constructing out of two halfs: bird dropping in for fruit on the bottom half, and the extended wing in mid-flap on the top half.


And what if the top wasn't the top nor the bottom the bottom, but rather they were reversed, or shown side-by-side? It's possible.

I've just barely gotten going on this piece; it's loose.
The real action for me, here, is the addition of food. I have wanted for a long time to paint birds feeding... diving in for rind, flesh, and zest, pecking, peeling and devouring. I pictured over-ripe fruit of all sorts, an embarassment of seeds and goods, sharp beaks and beating wings and tearing and stripping. Leaving cores and stones and a mess, fructose-drunk. It proved amazingly hard to find references of birds feeding really exuberantly. Starlings, at last, have turned up in a number of photos. Apparently they are the hungriest, and the fondest of fruits like quince and plums that get real red and hot and gory.

I'm not sure why, but this is precisely what I want-- images of things that swoop down and pull the pulp out of other things, get their beaks shiny with juice and keep their eyes wide open.
I don't mean for it to be violent, though it's hungry.
I'm not interested in painting the owls with their mice, let's not even talk about it. I just want to tear fruit to shreds.

I have several sketches going and this one painting started, and it seems like there's a good chance they'll come out like I mean them to.
I guess it all depends on how you look at eating, especially the eating of things portrayed at about 5,000 times their actual size.
I guess it's possible that watching the big, vivid and vigorous Eating Of Things might at first seem gluttonous, or might seem like too much, over-large, again like watching those men who pull trucks with their teeth. Or women who pull schoolbuses with their teeth. But then you watch for a little longer and realize that it's perfect and that maybe it's really all there is in life, filling your belly and picking things up and putting them back down in other places and then filling your belly with something new that you found in that other place after you put the first thing down and before you pick up the next thing, which might be an airplane because once you've picked up a schoolbus you can probably do whatever you want. And eat whatever you want.

I think I could paint birds feeding on colorful and pierced things and the images wouldn't wouldn't be vicious or greedy, they would just be about getting what you need.


Whatchoo think?