waiting days to Christmas

aahhh...heat! Love the new furnace. And, the sugar ants that came in from the cold to hang out with us are gone. Everything is coming together for our Christmas Eve family gathering here. I have rearranged the studio to make space for overflow from our little house. If all goes as planned, this will be the last of our 26 Christmases here and next year I'll be blogging from the lake. These are the waiting days before Christmas. My shopping is done because I won't join the throngs in stores and it is too late for free shipping for online purchases.  But, it is too early to make the last of the cookies and pies, clean the house or set the table.

This is a good time to write my annual Letter to Mama - she passed away in 2004. This year, I will tell her that I threw out all my reference photos and am painting from memory, or my "minds-eye." I threw them out so I wouldn't be tied to specifics of a scene. I have a tendency to be too literal so when using crisp, clear reference photos; I end up in a struggle between what I see in the photo and what I see in my mind's-eye.

An avid picture-taker with her little Kodak Instamatic camera, Mama will be glad to know that I still have her box of photos. Her photos are very bad...and I mean that in the best way! They are blurry and usually have me guessing what it was she was aiming for. But, they are scenes through Mama's eyes and that idea really appeals to me for a series of paintings. Here is the first one I'm interpreting: it appears to be flooding in our home town, Auburn, Washington.

I'm using a glazing technique for this oil painting. That means drying time between each painting session. The final step will be to add some detail and hard edges to this amorphous foundation but right now I'm working with value, temperature and mood.