Hedge

On a recent photo and sketch trip with Dearest, we stopped at a drugstore to run a little side errand. She went in and I didn't need to, so I sat in the car and looked across Roxboro Road. There was a hedge and some bare winter trees at the edge of the street - a planting done years before by the city of Durham and then made asymetrical and more interesting by time and accident. I played my usual game of moving, adding, removing shapes in my head to improve the composition, and I found I liked a number of the things that were going on in the small trees, in particular. I took a photo, thinking it might inspire a painting.

And it did. This was mostly finished several weeks ago, but I set it aside in favor of other projects. Today, feeling very low from the flu (it seems as if my lungs are doing their best to slowly kill me - medications are beginning to have some effect finally, after six days) but wanting desparately to pick up a brush or a pencil, I realized I knew how I wanted to finish it. That knowledge enabled me to get through an hour and a half of painting before it was completed and I was too tired to do more than take the photos and go down for lunch. Lunch gave me enough energy to write this post...

Now I will take the medication that makes me the most nauseous of my flu pharmacopia, and sit on the bed all propped upright with pillows because any incline makes the coughing uncontrollable, which is excrutiating since the coughing fits have caused a muscle spasm in my back... This is what I meant about my lungs, which are the seat of the trouble, the camp of my viral/bacterial overlord which I must overthrow with the nightly fevers and the antibiotic (which also makes me nauseous - but I'm sticking with it because it's the mighty Z-pack, and the first dose is the hard one - it gets easier from there).

And while I sit up in bed, and before I try to drift off for a fitfull nap, I will read more of my big Taschen book about Gustav Klimt, which inspired the painting urge today, and who in part inspired this painting with his unusual, close-up, dense landscapes.

Watercolor - 24x18 - Arches hot press.

And on a separate and totally unrelated note, the last meal I prepared for my family before I went into household quarrantine was this pie for Pi Day (March 14th). I really like the calligraphic things that happen automatically as the pie crust expands, opening the slits and allowing their edges to brown. Pi was one of my favorite numbers as a gradeschool kid, as were the weirdly patterned repeating decimals you get from all the fraction values of "sevenths" (1/7, 2/7, 3/7, etc.). I remember my dad teaching it to me up to the tenth digit, and can hear his rhythmic sing-song as he recited it, "Three point one four one five nine, two six five three five." I believe the next digit is a zero or a one, so stopping here after ten is mighty accurate for most human needs...