August 26, 2007 Day 129
Bored, restless, irritated and burned out is how I felt when I started this morning's drawing. First, I looked at yesterday's effort: Ugh. I don't want to do that again, I thought, so I started with a bright red, my favorite color. But the composition went nowhere and pretty soon, even color couldn't save this attempt.
Drawing #131 11" x 14"
How much bad art do I have to make in order to get to the good art? Yesterday's painting session revealed another weird result. I was still painting over an old canvas, trying to get the new to merge with the old, and ended up here:
Canvas 18 40" x 40"
This painting originally looked like this:
Canvas 18 in a prior life
Everything I've been doing lately has been doomed to failure. Yesterday I took some short test videos with my Nikon Coolpix 8700 digital camera, and could not get them to play back on my computer. In the process, I messed up the camera settings I usually use to photograph paintings for my website and blog.
After struggling with the impenetrable manual for an hour or two, I gave up. Pushing buttons too fast without thinking has gotten me into trouble before, and I'm sure it will in the future. I tackled the manual again this morning, and I think I've got it fixed now. But I still can't get any software on my computer to read the video files correctly. Yet a year ago I made several videos that work fine. What am I doing wrong?
Adrian suggested I ask Stan Bowman, my printmaker, for help. "Isn't he an expert photographer?"
"Yeah," I said. "Maybe as a last resort."
(Note: There is a gap between the dates I'm writing and posting in order to give me time to get ahead in case we travel and I'm not able to post.)
