If there’s one thing all the great Masters have in common, it’s oil paint. (Horrid generalization, but work with me here.) Now, I’ve painted quite a bit. Having a painter and former art teacher for a father kind of lends itself to that. But let’s just say I have a whole new respect for all those old Masters. Painting a landscape sounds really easy; then, all of the sudden, you’re half-covered in blue paint and throwing sponges across the garage because the bush you’ve been painstakingly speckling is now a green-crimson blob. There is nothing more frustrating then getting all that perfect linework down on your canvas, only to start blending and, oh! look, you have a lovely blue-green-gray smudge. It’s like trying to write a story in Italian and realizing that you don’t know any of the rules anymore.
At the same time, it was amazing fun. Having dad there to show me the tricks step-by-step didn’t hurt either. It’s also amazingly freeing–in a way, more forgiving then acrylics, since it can take days to dry and mistakes can be rubbed away into the background or scraped off and filled in. It’s like spending all your life writing on a typewriter and suddenly being given a computer with that magical Backspace key. So for an obsessive-compulsive editor like me, it’s the perfect magic medium. Next step? Portraiture. And maybe by the time I do my second painting, I’ll have gotten all the blue off my elbows.
And now for something completely different. (Oh, Monty Python, how I love you and your oddball antics!) Third story submitted to fourth literary magazine. Paper copy of first story still not mailed. Butt still not in gear. Fourth story . . . sort of kind of not really in progress.
Hey, at least I’m thinking about it. Cheers.
C.J. Listro 