I’m having a professionally frustrating day, so I thought I’d share with you this little pick me up I found.
The Luckystar team sent out this press release for Friday’s show, so I just wanted to make sure I linked to their flier.
With supreme apologies to Anya in London, RIP to Mad Men‘s Ida Blankenship. The greatest line in television was uttered by Bert Cooper on Sunday: “She was born in 1898 in a barn; she died on the 37th floor of a skyscraper: she was an astronaut.”
It is wonderful having Polish women (Misia and Anya’s mothers) in the house to make pierogis and mushrooms. The house smells divine.
I’m gearing up for my first day of teaching in four years. I’ll say this much, age and maturity can lead to pedagogical over-preparedness.
I digress. This past Sunday’s episode of Mad Men was b e y o n d. If you are not watching this series, you can watch this episode and it stands alone. Like a play or something. But if you are watching this series, then you know what a heartbreakingly tender portrait of a true friendship this was. Don and Peggy are everything to each other. Father/daughter, brother/sister, husband/wife, best friends/advocates. I didn’t think anything would be better than the scene of Peggy riding the moped on a soundstage in a circle.
And then this. This episode is why television can be beautiful.
The painting was still pretty wet today, so I wasn’t able to work on it as much. A more patient painter would wait until the paint is dry to continue working on it, but I am not that painter. Actually, I’m fairly patient, but I’m also really good at painting wet-on-wet. A traditional grisaille underpainting calls for using thinner rather than medium, but I use medium, which retards the drying process. What can I say, I like retarders.
Today, I worked on everything but the sky and the lampposts. If I was truly concerned with sharpness and accuracy, I would paint the entire painting to finish, and then add the posts and wires on top of it. But I like the look that happens when I have to paint around the posts. It’s a little uneven, a sort of hand-drawn look to the image. On all of these paintings, the wires are the last thing I paint. It’s slightly risky, painting tiny lines onto a nearly-finished painting. But I guess that’s how I get my kicks. Being risky.
Total aside: are you watching Mad Men? Was there anything better than this week’s episode when Peggy Olsen was driving a motorcycle in a circle on a soundstage? It was, as she is, sublime.