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Preparing to paint
This afternoon I took an empty gallon paint pail for a nice walk around the neighborhood. Now, I know what you're thinking, this sounds like one of those strange exercises magazines recommend for the elderly in articles like, "10 Ways To Stay Fit As You Spiral Down Toward Your Grave." But no. The story is different, though no less inane.Our weather has been "variable" of late. I frequently switch between regular and "rain" pants over the course of a day. And then there are the work pants I put on to do painting (every few minutes, it seems). So my junk -- keys and ID and pepper spray -- are scattered in a variety of pockets.
Today I was taking advantage of a break in the rain to bolt across town to the paint store, to pick up a quart of the paint our painters ran out of yesterday. I threw on a reasonable pair of pants, found my keys and the pail of paint for identification purposes, and headed for the bus that takes me to that neighborhood. It's a five block walk and I waited 15 minutes for the bus, and as it was arriving I realized I left my transit card and all my ID in another pair of pants.
I walked back home. Since a late lunch was part of my original scheme, I was now too hungry to wait for another bus to go across town. So now I'm at the nearer of my regular pizzerias-with-good-WiFi. I'll get my paint tomorrow.
Paul Cézanne - From Proust...
p98 Cézanne's art exposes the process of seeing. Although his paintings were criticized for being unnecessarily abstract -- even the impressionists ridiculed his technique -- they actually show us the world as it first appears to the brain. A Cézanne painting has no boundaries or stark black lines separating one thing from the next. Instead, there are only strokes of paint, and places on the canvas where one color, knotted on the surface, seems to change into another color. This is the start of vision: it is what reality looks like before it has been resolved by the brain. The light has not yet been made into form.
... even as his art celebrates its strangeness, it remains loyal to what it represents... Because he gives the brain just enough information, viewers are able to decipher his paintings and rescue the picture from the edge of obscurity...
...What starts as an abstract mosaic of color becomes a realistic description. The painting emerges, not from the paint or the light, but from somewhere inside our mind. We have entered into the work of art: its strangeness is our own.
...
p99 ...The symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire, a natural skeptic of science, [and a synesthete] reviewed a photographic exhibition in 1859 by proclaiming the limits of the new medium. Its accuracy, he said, is deceptive, nothing more than phony simulacra of what was really out there. The photographer was even -- and Baudelaire only used this insult in matters of grave import -- a materialist. In Baudelaire's romantic view, the true duty of photography was "to be the servant of the sciences and arts, but the very humble servant, like printing or shorthand, which have neither created nor suplemented literature. . . . If it {photography} is allowed to encroach upon the domain of the imaginary, upon anything whose value depends solely upon the addition of something of a man's soul, then it will be so much the worse for us." Baudelaire wanted the modern artist to describe everything that the photograph ignored: "the transient, the fleeting, the contingent."
p100 Inspired by Baudelaire's writings and the provocative realism of Edouard Manet, a motley group of young French painters decided to rebel. The camera, they believed, was a liar. Its precision was false. Why? Because reality did not consist of static images. Because the camera stops time, which cannot be stopped; because it renders everything in focus, when everything is never in focus. Because the eye is not a lens, and the brain is not a machine.
These rebels called themselves the impressionists... If the camera captured the dot, the impressionists represented the blur. They wanted to capture time in their paintings, show how a bail of hay changes in the afternoon shadows, or how the smoke of a train leaving Gare Saint-Lazare slowly fades into thin air. As Baudelaire insisted, they painted what the camera left out.
Chased out of Brain Wash by a sudden incursion of stand-up comedy.
Painting
When I paint with a small roller I always try to save the roller cover so I can use it again. This is usually less than successful. I have a small collection of covers that are too stiff and uneven to choose to use, but I can't bring myself to toss out since... You never know what you'll need some day. And now that may pay off.I couldn't be on site when the painter was finishing his work in our entry, so the last thing I said to him was, "If there's anything you can't get to, make sure it's low on the walls so I can reach it." And there is one low surface I need to paint now that I've bought another quart of the paint he ran out of. But, the biggest problem is at the top of the space in the hardest places for me to reach.
I know exactly what happened: I watched him using the roller to "feather" the new paint in with the old paint so that the dividing line isn't obvious. But then he sent his assistant up the ladder (I'm guessing) to get the seams where the walls and ceiling meet. And that guy didn't understand the feathering concept. It looks terrible. My idea is to use a rough, small roller cover at the end of a long pole (a longer pole than the one that is no longer in our equipment area but that the painter insists he didn't take!) to feather all the visible lines near the seams. (On the ceiling the line is on the new paint, not where the new meets the old, and I don't even know how he managed that.)
Confidence is moderately high.
Hours later...
Only an utter fool would roller paint from a fresh can onto a wall without first testing if the color matched. Guess who is an utter fool? Me. Guess how closely the new paint matched the old paint? Not very.
I still have some options, and I can't do anything at the moment because the paint store closes early on Sunday?!?!
My technique did work with what little of the old paint remained, which is even more irritating since I would be done now if the paint was a match. I really need to eat something.
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