Grist for the mill

I started work on this one yesterday but had to leave before it dried enough to add more layers. Finishing it today, I realize that's going to be a drawback with pouring -- I seem to look at them and try to turn them into something, instead of being able to just use the pours for groundwork for more abstraction. That old left brain kicking in again, I suspect.

Which is not to say a tulip and an iris are bad, but that's not what I'm wanting to paint. So I may need to go back to earlier methods to get where I need to go, and just do pourings as decorative touchup rather than as backgrounds for other work.

But it's all grist for the mill, as they say; so many opportunities to learn! Or -- as Garrison Keillor says, "To an English major, everything is material." So true.

We drove up north yesterday and spent several hours with my daughter and son-in-law. Like us, they come from an island with very few covid cases, and no new ones in the last month or so, so we elected not to wear masks, though we did maintain a certain distance, and didn't hug (and boy, was that hard!) It was lovely, so lovely, to spend time with them after so many months apart! And -- as an extra bonus (so appropriate to the occasion) a mother deer elected to nurse her fawns right outside our window, as if to say, isn't being a mom amazing?

It surely is. Here's a video for you (note the POURING rain!):