midnight mist

I've found myself in a funk lately. I'm tired, but I can't sleep. When I wake up I don't want to do anything but watch tv. There's nothing on tv (oh, shush, PBS devotees, I want zazzy scripted drama, not pandas mating or opera or period pieces)...

Anyway, in an effort to make the most of the garbage bill (since I'm the one who mails out the cheque) I have been going through the house and throwing away a lot of things that no one wants or needs. Yes, recyclers and thrifters everywhere just groaned. Seriously, I can guarantee you that dusty cardboard that has been sitting in the garage for 8 years and has been crawled over by all manner of insects is, in fact, not a glorious vintage find. Neither is that broken plastic hummingbird feeder...

I have lived a life of what a professional organizer would probably categorize as chronic disorganization. And I have a lot of stuff, and some of it is cool and some of it is useless, and a lot of the time it ends up in a pile on the floor or on my desk or on a shelf. I always think "I'll organize that eventually, but right now I really have to vacuum, because company or the cable guy is going to be here soon." There's never enough time to clean, but the future to organize the piles and boxes and bags of stuff squirreled away from the curious eyes of family and strangers is endless, right? Of course.

So, every once in a while I flip through one of my old sketchbooks and bask in the glory of all the things I have drawn or half drawn and not finished over the years... and the funny thing about my sketchbooks is that they were always kind of there.  They were there in junior high and high school, and they were there in college.  And they don't just have drawings in them, I often took notes in my sketchbook, which was my way of sitting there during a lecture and entertaining myself while pretending to pay attention.

So, when I got to my "Art History" notes, I was pretty amused. All those 'famous' paintings and their periods and dates. Except for the ones that don't have dates, those circa some year paintings. Well, I have plenty of undated work.  In fact, this little gem has no date on it:

midnight mist

All I could really tell you is that: yes, I painted it, it's salt on watercolor, and it was done in or after 2008 and probably before 2011. But really, I painted it and the date of the painting is irrelevant. It doesn't indicate anything. It'd just be a factoid.

I like this painting, although it's not exactly my personal color palette. I wear a lot of black (t-shirts) I don't so much decorate with it. And color scheme-wise it is a little goth/noir/dark in the vibe department. That's something I like as a character, not necessarily something that is my character. Technically I might be dark and moody sometimes (or a lot of the time) but I never had a penchant for dying my hair black, reading poetry, enjoying the Cure, or wearing eyeliner. Come to think of it, I've never seen any of those Twilight movies that the kids were all raging about, in spite of the fact that I watch Grimm & Once Upon a Time (and watched The Gates and The 9 Lives of Chloe King) and enjoy that Caress Scarlet Blossom body wash (which you know was meant for girls on Team Edward) (I just like the way it smells, and Patchouli is supposed to be the official fragrance of hippies, right?).

Anyway, I made that painting. And I probably wasn't thinking about goth things or romance novels when I did it. The truth is always more droll. I probably had a big puddle of black paint on my palette, along with the puddle of blue and that old tube of crimson red I bought way back when I was still in college (graduated 2002) and yet it is still pliable in the tube... and since it happened to be there, well, the painting happened. I know, that so lacks zazz. Lack of a cool story or inspiration aside — I think the painting looks cool. And well, paintings are things to look at.

So the lack of date or inspirational story is irrelevant to me. The painting is the painting. The paint is right there on the paper.

midnight gypsy

And so, via the magic of drawing and process and photoshop and my epson scanner — midnight mist is now immortalized in the wings of a fantasy butterfly. You can check out the rest of it's gypsy cousins at sarahkdesigns.

Have a lovely weekend!