I keep meaning to write more blog posts, but it’s hard to find the time. What am I doing with my time instead? Not much!

Well, that’s not totally true. I lied. I’ve been doing a lot of stuff, but not much on the art front. I’m about to return to work on that last painting (work in progress) I posted. I was able to work on it a tiny bit more a few days ago, but since I had to let it dry a bit, it’s just sat there.

When working in oils, I tend to start all the way to the left and work my way across the canvas to the right. That way, I’m not sticking my hand in wet oil paint. Being right-handed, I also don’t want to smudge or drag paint. I end up doing it anyway, though, but that’s because I easily forget things, and I drop the side of my hand right smack in the middle of the wet paint. Shit! I know that part is wet. What the hell is wrong with me??? And so it goes.

I’m not one to make a mess. I’m a little anal like that, or OCD, or meticulous. Take your pick. Every time I make one little mistake or get paint on my hand, I’m reaching for the antiseptic wipes. I swear by those. But I decided to work on everyone’s faces last time I worked on this, so I wouldn’t have to mix a bunch of flesh tones later on. Now that the faces are at least surface dry, I can get back to work. On this. I still have no title for it.

The working title is just Mom in Mexico. It comes from an old, ripped photograph of my mom with two of her friends visiting Tijuana in 1951. I liked how cliche it was. They are posing for a picture set that is obviously for tourists. And this was before my mom turned into what she became later in life.

There’s still a lot of work I need to do. I don’t like how my mother’s face looks. It doesn’t look like her. I seemed to get her likeness in all the other paintings in this series, but not here. So I’ll have to do something about it when I work my way over. I also wound up smearing the young woman all the way to the right (on purpose), when I later thought I should’ve smeared my mom’s face instead. I may still do something to it, but that would leave the middle woman all “normal.” I don’t want any of them to look normal.

I also should have left the donkey’s head alone. It’s not perfect, so I guess it doesn’t matter, but the ears and the top of his head looked better before I fucked with it. Nobody needs to know except you, the reader of this.

I was going to write about how Ruby’s been doing in dog school, but now I have to try to work on this painting sometime today, and before I get so tired that I can’t move. And I also still have to go see my pain doctor in half an hour. So, bye for now.