June 21, 2022 — The palm painting is finished! Happy Solstice! Right now, it’s a new relationship, not exactly love at first sight, but I may fall in love with it more later. That often happens. I will know with time. Sometimes I go back to pick a painting up from image capture and that I haven’t seen it for 3 weeks and I go into a swoon over it. This is maybe a painting I was completely unsure of when I dropped it off. 

This especially happened in Andrew’s image capture studio because he had the whole place utterly flooded with delicious studio-quality lighting. The pieces would absolutely pop. As opposed to where I go now, which is oddly not that well lit. Drove me crazy at first, but I’ve come to trust that the captures are wonderful with the scanback. And Andrew died, tragically and suddenly of a stroke, so this is Sacramento’s last and only option for image capture and thus I am grateful. And I miss Andrew. A lot. His death remains surreal and I can’t quite write about it yet. 

May you be well, Andrew, wherever you are now. Sending you lots of love. May the light around you be even more dazzling.

So… the palm painting is finished. Thank goodness, a day early. Perhaps I write the newsletter tomorrow after all. Then Thursday, it’s off to Napa to swap out the vineyard painting and overnight at Anne’s in Lafayette, my cousin. Friday, heading back north through Sacramento to pick up the last round of captures. 

I’m showing the painting below. It’s so cliché, a lone palm arching over a sunset streaked ocean! What can you do? I guess bump it with a trumpet. So I did, adding more of the scrolled rococo clouds. I have no idea if I like it.