It is the 13th of the month and I have not yet done anything. A still life project sits in my kitchen but soon there will be no more since I am eating all the fruits little by little…A strange way to commemorate the end of my third year of painting-again. I am in Monti and there are simply too many distractions. I work 6 and a half hour a day for my employer, I sun bathe, I do gardening for hours, I organize what there is to be done to the plants (making calls, meeting workers, meeting them again because they do not show up…) and by the time it is 8 Pm I have no more energy but to water the petunias, roses, dahlias & Co..
In Berlin it is much simpler: I get home from work and the Covid alternative for the past 20 months has been either Netflix or painting. Here painting would mean I would miss being outside, in the country, in Italy in the summer. I can not paint outside. Too many mosquitos, the lights change, the bugs fly around, the cats stare at me saying “are you sure?”…I can not focus. I did a couple of things but they are pathetic. Tomorrow I am on for the weekly review with Peter Bonnard of the ASL online class and I had to send stuff I did three years ago because I have nothing decent that is recent and that I had not already submitted to some other teacher… sometime I look at 2019 stuff and I think I painted better three years ago then now.
I know that the best antidote for lack of inspiration is just to paint no matter what, the process will pull you in….Maybe after three years of painting almost every day, I needed a 2 weeks break. …in 10 days I am back in the Berlin, smack in pre-winter weather and surrounded (sigh) by too many people and painting will be the best thing to do.
September is ending and I did six little things. Wow. What excessive laziness.
Well, I am back in Berlin now and all the distractions of the Italian summer in the country are gone. One of the very few benefits of this otherwise gloomy state of things, besides avoiding the dangers of getting too much sun at my age (or at any), is the fact that I will finally start painting again.
Water, Pigment, Paper, Brushes & Co. 