I have been working so much lately that I haven’t painted as much as I need to. A while back I blogged my Black and White Study from the Equine Painting Workshop. I’ve repainted Geneia’s face since then because I wanted it to actually look like her, so I’m posting it again. I’ve now finished my color study, at least for the moment. I may end up making revisions after I’ve had a chance to live with it for a few days. I added a rock outcropping to the background, because the field in the original photograph was too boring. I’ve left the rocks unfocused-looking, so ithey don’t distract from the main figures, but Geneia’s face is entirely in shadow, which makes it a challenge to draw attention to it. I will ponder the problem.

Now, I will go back to my Greek Myth paintings.  In a few weeks, Matt and I will be traveling to Maine and Quebec. I would sooooo like to hit the Boston area on the way there. I’ve always wanted to visit the haunts of Nathaniel Hawthorne (click on link…..hello), especially the actual House of Seven Gables. The novel fired my imagination in highschool, not all of it perhaps, but definitely the riveting chapter about Alice Pyncheon, where she is hypnotized by the handsome grandson of the man unjustly accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake by Alice’s grandfather. (I’ve always wanted to see House made into a movie, where Rufus Sewell plays both the mesmerizing Matthew Maule and the daguerotypist, Holgrave, and Ian McShane plays his father, Thomas, who is done out of his land and his life by the greedy Colonel Pyncheon.) Hawthorne wrote the novel as a sort of expiation because one of his ancestors was involved in the Salem Witch Trials. I also want to visit the Old Manse, where Hawthrone lived with his bride (lucky girl), Sophia Peabody, one of the intellectual Peabody Sisters, the one who was an artist…..

There’s been no poetry of late in my blogs, so I will get back on track with Edna St. Vincent Millay:

XVI

Once more into my arid days like dew,

Like wind from an oasis, or the sound

Of cold sweet water bubbling underground,

A treacherous messenger, the thought of you

Comes to destroy me; once more I renew

Firm faith in your abundance, whom I found

Long since to be but just one other mound

Of sand, whereon no green thing ever grew.

And once again, the wiser in no wise,

I chase your coloured phantom on the air,

And sob and curse and fall and weep and rise

And stumble pitifully on to where,

Miserable and lost, with stinging eyes,

Once more I clasp, — and there is nothing there.