And Along Came a Cloud

And Along Came a Cloud, gouache on paper on board, 10” x 10”

(I'm done with the painting part, I still need to airbrush on the acrylic medium later tonight, after it dries.)

This piece actually started a couple of weeks ago. I always have containers of JUST A LITTLE BIT OF PAINT left over. Too little to do anything with, but of course I can't just toss it out. So I actually got several pieces started just by adding lots of water to each color and pouring them on prepared panels. So here I've brushed on some colors and while the paper was still a bit damp, poured more colors on the panel and just moved the watery colors around by rotating and tilting the panel. This was so beautiful and I almost didn't want to do anything else with it.

But I'm not that type of an artist...you know, the type that knows to leave well enough alone.



So here I've really ruined a good thing:



And before the Big Finish. I struggled for a while to figure out what was bothering me here—and I'm still not sure that I've completely fixed the problem—but I think the red, circular intestine-looking thing really needed a break (ie, so it wasn't a complete enclosure). The finished image is the top image.



As always, I had the radio on as I was working on this, and I was reminded of spending my summers at my grandmother's house.

She was a devout Buddhist, and in the afternoons, we would always have the radio tuned to the station where they discussed the Buddhist sutras. The program was a mixture of Taiwanese and Sanskrit (with a Taiwanese or Mandarin accent, I suspect), neither of which I understood (or understand). But I can still remember the sounds and the voices. Now, whenever I hear Farsi, I'm instantly transported back to my grandmother's house, with the radio on, she bent over her sewing and I lying on the bed taking an afternoon rest.