Brushes and Books A watercolor a week and a bonus book review from Catharine Woods

White on White

Brushes: More than once during Open Studios, someone asked me how long it took to paint a particular painting.  While I probably should have been prepared to answer that question, I wasn’t.  I usually fumbled around a bit and tried to change the subject because I felt uncomfortable giving an exact number.  I think the reason was that I was getting hung up on the word ‘paint.’  I could fairly easily log the hours I spend with paintbrush in hand, but that would vastly underestimate the time the goes into making a painting.  So much time goes into the preparatory steps.  For example, with a still life, I’ll consider possible elements for days or weeks before ever setting anything up.  Sometimes I know exactly what I want to include, but don’t own it, so I go out hunting.  When all the possible objects have been assembled, I wait for a bright, sunny day without much wind so that I can set up my still life outdoors.  Then the photography session begins.  I move objects around, change perspectives, add and subtract elements, change the focal length, and take countless digital pictures.  Those get loaded onto my computer and I spend even more time cropping and messing around with contrast and color.  I print out several references and make a detailed drawing, and THEN I finally get to pick up a paintbrush.  And even when I’m not painting, the painting is always occupying part of my mind, and I’m working through the issues that I anticipate will crop up in the next painting session.  Once the painting is done, it needs to be photographed, taken to the printer, matted, and framed.

I’ve decided there really isn’t a short answer to the question, “How long did it take you to paint that?” I’ll just post this week’s painting, White on White, and you can try to guess.

Books: The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa.  I probably would never have discovered this book on my own, but it was a book group pick, and I loved it! It is a quick, but rather deep read.  There’s nothing extraneous in this book, which adds to the overall Japanese tone.  Very briefly, it is about a professor of mathematics who has an accident that leaves him with a memory impairment–he can only hold new information in his short term memory for 80 minutes.  A housekeeper comes to work for him, and this book is about the relationship that forms between them and between the professor and the housekeeper’s son.  More than anything else, though, the book is about the beauty of mathematics and numbers and how the professor continues to relate to the world and other people through his love for numbers.  A beautiful story, beautifully crafted.