So, it’s 2007, another lengthly break in the notblogs that would have ended a week or two ago, but I didn’t want the all new, oft updated notblog to look like a new years resolution.
To catch up, in the last couple of months I’ve turned 27, slept a lot, eaten quiche and sushi and done less work than i should have.
And so there we are, up to date.
As i spend a lot of my time avoiding things I should be doing, like writing comedy and booking gigs and that, I probably didn’t need another time-consuming activity to sap my hours. So after visiting the biggest art shop ever before christmas by accident I decided to take up painting.
It started as a loverly present for Claire for christmas, I painted her three tiny canvases of things we’d done in the last year – one was us at festivals (two stick figures in front of a tent, easy shape to paint), one as stonehenge (always choose tourist attractions with good geometric shapes – easier to paint when you decide to be overly sentimental at chirstmas) and the last was us in oslo (very tricky to paint).
One of the things I love most about painting is the lack of pressure, these aren’t things to show, or like comedy, to create and then let a bunch of strangers possibly rip it apart. It is just for me to do, thereaputic really.
And, most pleasingly, I’m rubbish at it, I don’t have a clue, I spent before Christmas reading a huge book on Edvard Munch, which started the painting bug (and the reason we went to Oslo was to see the Scream), but learnt that Munch spent his life constantly learnign painting techiniques, it was doubtful I was going to open my acrylic paint starter set and not look like a child drawing his parents and a rocket.
But there’s something undoubted reassuring about this and after a few weeks of occasional pottering, last night I finished my first picutre, and am pleasantly surprised that it’s not as rubbish as my skills should allow it. I’m almost proud.
It’s worth having other money paying deadlines slipping so that I can look at some colours.
I was going to put a picture of it on here… but that would kinda defeat the object of it not being for show, wouldn’t it?