Thoughts from the random-access mind.
On my walk this morning at 6:30 ,
I pass by the horses who live across the street. Their corral has about 200 feet of
road/driveway frontage. It’s filled with
a workout arena, a barn, decomposed granite dirt, some scrubby sage and cactus
chaparral and white board fences. Two sorrels and a bay appear to ignore me way
off on the other side of their roaming acreage.
I’m silent in my tennis shoes, but a gelding whose tail is to me,
suddenly pops his head up from his ground search for goodies and turns to look
at me. I know that horses’ eyes are
placed on the sides of their heads, and know they can see almost to their tails
while facing front, but I didn’t know their vision was so adept as to see me
across an acre of land. If I don’t learn
anything else today, I finally learned that.
It only took me all my lifetime so far.
The apple tree in back is still making fruit, bless its heart. Mostly apples fall on the ground and make the
rabbits happy. We’ve eaten them until we’re
loaded for the year. I might pick some
apples to take to the horses tomorrow, even though their owner is paranoid
about anybody even talking to her horses. I guess she's worried people will cause them to wander to the dark side.
I wonder if I could go to jail for feeding a horse an apple. She’s the kind of person I really don’t care
if I offend.
I notice the other side of the driveway/road, which has
about 500 feet of frontage and is an award winning winery orchard. Rows of grapevines are almost full in
season. All at once half the orchard has
white netting draped over the rows. I
don’t know if this is to keep the birds off the fruit, or to keep the sun from
damaging the crop. And why only half the
crop? Maybe different grapes. I’ll ask somebody if I get a chance.
I’m currently sending what we call Query Letters to
publishers to seat Chattahoochee Dead, my new book. This is a tedious process as each publisher
requires different information in addition to the manuscript. I’ve sent it to three publishers, have heard
back from none of them, which is routine.
Each will take a minimum of eight weeks to respond IF they like the
book. If they don’t like it, I simply
will never hear from them again. So I
intend to send it to several more publishers, but I get depressed and have to
split up the organizational time as I find it disheartening. Ergo, I paint.
Since painting for me is such a goofy process, I think I’m
going to put this new one in my blog as I paint it. I hope nobody thinks less of me for it,
because I don’t sit down and whip out a painting one time through. It remains a process of becoming until one
day I pronounce it finished and simply quit working on it. Until then it gets pretty ugly sometimes
(usually) before it starts resembling a snapshot of life. In actuality, I think it goes from abstract
to impressionistic. I usually stop
there. Sometimes try for really fine art
and usually disappoint myself when I do that.
But my point is, the beginnings of my pictures nowhere near resemble the
finished products. At one time this was
very upsetting for me, not knowing this is how my brain has to do it. I’d get part way into a painting and couldn’t
find the picture in there anywhere. Very
frustrating. But I learned to persevere
and the picture would show up eventually.
So now I just keep painting, no matter what it looks like and
eventually, there it comes. I'll post this tomorrow.
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