WIP

Interesting (and why don't you put your WIPs under the WIP heading, eh?  Answer me that!  Young people today, thinking they can go where they want without so much as a by-your-leave and excuse my feet...) Yes, obviously the drugs haven't kicked in yet.   As you were then - do you often employ this practice, i.e. just getting paint down with no clear idea of where you're going?  Because I think my life would be a lot easier if I did the same: what I do is wait for a subject, look for one, search through old sketchbooks, go for a walk (and so rarely find anything, for some reason) , and worry myself stupid that I can't settle on anything (it helps of course if one's stupid to start with..).   I've always done this, and I'm beginning to annoy myself by doing so.   Now and then, not often enough, I have a dream, and will paint an image from that - but I wish I could break myself of the habit of looking for "scenes", just sitting there waiting for me.   Of course, when I find one I'll adapt it, sometimes beyond recognition.   This may be a development of the "where's that then?" syndrome - because I labelled my deceased website "Isle of Wight Landscapes", that's what people expected; I hadn't anticipated that people would moan that I'd moved a cliff, shifted a building, uprooted a copse - if I'd called it something less specific, they wouldn't have expected specificity.  I hope, given my future intentions.  Anyway: I'm going to try making a new website under a different domain name.  And while I'm dithering, havering, procrastinating over that, I shall await the progress of your WIP with keen anticipation.  Looks like a good start - acrylic start to oil completion?  

Well, you've had the decency to make an apology, Marjorie, so we'll pass over your error.  I'm not one, I say, I'm not one, to be intolerant.  So long as it never happens again....... Waving the brush about (he said: coming back to his own character rather than whoever the Hell THAT was) is SO familiar to me: you want to paint, you really, really want to paint, and either no idea comes, or you have so many, and none seems quite right.  I think in such circumstances (don't think for a minute that I've resolved this dilemma) you either slope off and make a pot of tea, or decide to go with the thing you first thought of, and then kick yourself for not doing something else.   This, I fear, is all part of our mutual experience - amateur, professional, somewhere in between, I don't think it makes any difference.  Is it better to have so many ideas you can't choose between them?  Is the problem that our ideas might be numerous, but - aren't that good?  Is it that we have no ideas at all, and if in doubt set up a still life?   I hope it's not the third of these, because, and this must be whispered because it's heresy, I just don't like still life - I don't want to paint it; even setting one up bores me to tears.  I know it's very helpful at the start - and I have done it, and I did learn from it; but why anyone KEEPS doing it is beyond me - how many times, and in how many ways, do you want to paint a ****** teapot?  Damned myself now as a philistine amateur.  Well, it had to happen eventually.  Duly ashamed, but just don't make me paint a still life.  Of course, it could just be that I'm barmy - it's a perfectly credible option.  If expense and time were not important considerations, I think I'd just paint and paint and paint again - resolving the issue by just galloping through all the possibilities; probably, many have done that.   But I don't have the energy to do that, even if I have the money - if anyone in our little community HAS found the ideal answer: let us know. Oh, and while you're at it: tell us what we have to do with all the canvases we've built up and haven't (yet, of course) sold.  

Marjorie, I'll be interested to see how this develops. Interesting start, could become a landscape? Robert, when your new website is up and running you will put the link on the Forum, won't you. Unsold canvases, paint something different over? Val-Irene is doing that, and I'm looking at some of mine too for a similar treatment.

Looking good.

I rather like that. I'm about to have a nice pot of tea now.  Normally, I start my day with a jug of coffee, but inspired by this discussion I've looked out Assam's finest - it will help to quench the thirst which excessive alcoholic consumption from the night before creates.  Coffee doesn't seem to do that; one of life's little mysteries.