Well, it’s an abstract painting – I enjoyed letting go – and putting down whatever colors I imagined while painting – I just go with it .

And after I got done with the abstract, I did a still life with a Cow’s Skull (below).

In my photo the Cow’s Skull is too washed out – did the best I could but a 1.3 Mega Pixel Mobile Phone Camera …it’s about as good a picture as I could get.

This “dark” still life reminds me of some later Cezanne landscapes and still life’s – my feeling it that sometimes I “hit” it and sometimes I don’t.   Perhaps if I arranged the still life more carefully I could have overcome a static quality to the arrangement – a sameness in the composition that makes it somewhat boring. 

On the other hand, a dead skull of a Cow is a dead skull, how interesting is it supposed to be?  And a plant is a plant – maybe it’s just a fact that a plant and a skull, while interesting to look at initially, are harder to translate into something visually interesting in a painting.

And I was thinking of those Skull paintings of Okeeffe, but I’m not really that kind of painter – I can’t just go for smooth lines with oil pastels – it’s not working for me.

The artist’s work is like a continuum, you have your peaks and lows and what’s in the middle, and all of them are necessary – you can’t just pick the stuff you like and reject the rest – it’s all necessary.

And these two paintings kept me busy most of the afternoon.