Blue milk jug

Yesterday I painted three works inspired by VG. I started on a fourth but my enthusiasm had run out like a kitchen sink emptying of water. I went to wash my dishes instead that had been sitting in dirty solitude for a few days.

I have used crotons as my sunflowers. They are hardy, and come in reds, greens, browns, and yellows. I went into the jungle and cut a branch, not paying any particular attention to their form of shape. They were longish leaves, slightly broad, lots of green with some yellow. Looking back maybe I should have selected a more sunny representation, perhaps more yellow and red.

The next one I did was inspired by VG’s blue vase. I do not have a vase, so I used a milk jug, well at least a blue pottery jug I have had for several years, having rescued it from a heap of used pottery that was left over from an auction of a dead woman’s belongings. The background is a loose representation of three strips of unrelated except for colour handmade batik that my friends Chris and Lilo make. I had sewn them together for another project that somehow has not taken firm hold in my mind. But it makes for a good background, since VG has uses of wallpapered walls against which to place objects, and I do not.

Today I have already painted another blue milk jug, this time with a cutting of pink oleanders. They grow all around the top of the hillside that protects my house from unwanted cows and visitors. This does not seem to deter the neighbour’s chickens that parade up and down my steps.

I am attempting to do quick still life captures.  My friend Wulf once said to me, or maybe more than once, than I draw better than I paint. So I am drawing with my paintbrush, and not worrying about keeping within the lines. I am happy to draw outside the box so to speak. The captures are of things in my house that perhaps have gone unnoticed and unrecorded. There is life in my house apart from me. Everything here is something that represents a period in my life. So I am reliving my life, not in a flash before my eyes, but through new eyes open to the possibility that my life surrounds me, and I need to pay attention to what it is saying.