Not done yet.  It seems like it is taking forever but it has only been two weeks this Monday.  A great deal more to go, perhaps, another two weeks.  I’m listening to Philip Glass while I work on it–the repetition in his music is hypnotic.  So much of art is repitition but, then, I’m repeating myself.  I used a new ink for this one and I can see that it is losing its intensity.  I leave them on my easel so that I can look at them all the time and, of course, the sun pours in through my kitchen window.  I tried this ink because someone told me  it was the most lightfast of all the inks.  I’m not worried, however, I have yet to go into it with the pastels.  Repetition,  pattern, color and Philip Glass, the things that are driving this picture.

This is the underpainting of the paper drawing I’m working on now.  I’ve decided to go big and this is large.  Thirty-two by forty, or forty by thirty-two, I forget which, but this stands a little less than halfway between the ceiling and the floor.  Either I’m very short or the kitchen is very small but it looks big to me.  Ok, ok, I’m short and the kitchen is small but that doesn’t diminish the task that I’ve set for myself—collaging a whole bunch of trees onto a crazy colored surface that right at this moment seems bigger than you know who.  I made a mistake in the lower right hand corner—collaged too dark a color into a white area.  Someone told me that the Lakota Indians deliberately introduce a mistake into their art works–a place for the spirit to enter.   I introduce a lot of mistakes in my work; none of them by intention.   Somehow this piece doesn’t call out to me the way the smaller drawings do, “Hey, lardo, turn off the television and get over here and work on me.”  Irritating!  Perhaps that rather shrill voice I hear when I’m not working is the spirit that entered my work when I made a mistake.    Note to myself–stop making mistakes.  Wait a minute!  What’s that I hear?  A voice,  a shrill voice, saying, “Hey, lardo, get off the internet and get over here and work on me!”  Sorry  folks, I’ve got to go!