June 17, 2022 — Palm perfect painting is taking form. Just like the title says. Fancy that. I feel like I hit a breakthrough today. It was my first long day on this painting and a relief to be able to relax a bit knowing I had a solid six hours there. Home now, chilling on this blog. It’s becoming quite habit forming to review the day in writing.

Oops interruption, need to load a TIF to Leno for proofing. Two red rose sales in one week! Is Venus rising or something? Okay that’s done, loading is in progress. It says it will take an hour!

Now where was I…? Oh, yes, palm perfect painting is taking form. As the title indicates. And while some titles may mislead (I’m thinking news headlines), this one is straightforward and true. It was a productive day despite my own energy being low. This neck thing is really wearing me down lately with headaches.

I finally think I’m getting the sunset colors and shapes where I want them. I changed it yet again today and I don’t think I’m done tweaking yet. But it’s getting there. Happily, the palm tree, itself, which was my big worry, is going up swimmingly, or jolly good, or whatever the elocution-enhanced British might say, haha. I’m reading Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty. That’s the setting: conservative high-end Tory Brits, everyone descended from a Lady or a Countess, etc., the dad being in Parliament. It’s set in the days of Margaret Thatcher. Rembrandts and original Cezannes on the walls. I could dig that, especially the latter. Or can you imagine owning an early Klimt? 

Synopsis for The Line of Beauty from Amazon:

Winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the NBCC award. From Alan Hollinghurst, the acclaimed author of The Sparsholt Affair, The Line of Beauty is a sweeping novel about class, sex, and money during four extraordinary years of change and tragedy.

In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby―whom Nick had idolized at Oxford―and Catherine, who is highly critical of her family’s assumptions and ambitions.

As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, this is a major work by one of our finest writers.

But returning to fine art, the palm perfect painting is taking form, here it is below. In closing, I invite you to sign up for my newsletter.