I Hate November

I hate November. It's my least favourite month of the year. The sky was that nasty colour of grey this morning, with diseased yellowy patches in it. It looked like something you'd expect to see after a nuclear cataclysm. Except it wasn't the apocalypse--it was just horrible old November. Faugh. And here I am, right smack bang in the middle of it, with more work to do than I can shake a stick at. Too many paintings; too little time.

I'd been struggling with the same one (a self-portrait) on and off for a couple of days, but most of the time I was just treading water--draw something, hate it, paint over it, hate that, paint over that too, rinse, repeat. Anyone who's ever painted will know THAT process. I wanted to do a picture that was very subtle--shades and gradations of off-white, for the most part. My palette is always fairly limited, but in this case, I pared it down to bare essentials. I roughed in an underpainting in pale bluish-greens and yellows, then started working up the highlights...and that's when the problems set in. Almost immediately, in other words. I was using hard brushes in Photoshop to avoid the shiny-smooth airbrushed look one sometimes gets, but the pale colours and low contrast was automatically flattening everything out. I exaggerated the basic forms to compensate, and made myself look like a goblin. Self-portraits are a pain that way--my vanity gets in the way, and goblin-ness cannot stand. Well, when I enlarged my eyes to compensate for the enormous schnozz I'd drawn, the picture lost all resemblance to me. So I spent the next couple of hours alternately staring at the reference photo (which had completely different lighting, and my head at a slightly different angle to the camera), and staring at the painting, wondering where the hell I went wrong.

The inevitable happened, of course--the face ended up looking completely overworked, and losing all the delicate subtletly I was going for. So I scribbled over the whole damn thing and started again. It's amazing how sometimes starting over makes all the difference. I hate throwing away hours of work, but I knew it had to be done. It's a good thing I listened to that nagging voice of reason in my brain. Suddenly, I could do no wrong. The face that emerged from the greyness was pinched and pouty, but indisputably mine. And once I had the likeness nailed, the rest fell into place very naturally. I got into the zone, and five hours had gone past before I knew it. I don't usually take that long on one picture, but the lack of contrast had its own unique set of problems which I'd never had to deal with before, so things went quite slowly.

At some point during the five hours I was painting, my mother telephoned. She'd been to a production of "The Magic Flute" in Toronto (I THINK it was Toronto, anyway. Could've been Hamilton. I wasn't really paying attention to that part.) Anyway, it was put on by a company called, I believe, "Opera Atelier", and apparently the set design was just brilliant. The designer had used Moorish, Venetian, and Egyptian influences, among others. All the backdrops were painted on huge canvas screens that went up and down behind the singers, and Mother said she'd never seen anything so stunning. Wish I'd got a look at that.

I didn't do much else today. I had pizza from the 99-cent pizza place downstairs for dinner. I wanted to get a steak, but I didn't get hungry until after 9:00, and all the good Takeout Taxi restaurants were closed. It was Fogg & Suds or nothing, and I'm sick of F&S. I ordered from them three times last week. I really wish I could still order from Tony Roma's; I used to get soup and salad from them almost every night, but then the aging delivery boy started hitting on me. He even asked me out on a date, and I was too polite to say no--but I've been avoiding him ever since, that I might avoid actually going on said date. Unfortunately, avoiding him entails NOT ordering from Tony Roma's. So it was nasty, greasy, cheesy pizza for me tonight. I was bad--I'm supposed to tell them to make my pizza without any tomato sauce, because tomato sauce gives me heartburn. But I just couldn't be arsed waiting around for a special order, so I scarfed down two slices of pepperoni pizza LADEN with tomato sauce and cheese. Shame on me!

So, I spent most of my day drawing and hating November. I have to say, November really has NOTHING going for it. Nothing at all. The weather's miserable, especially here in Vancouver. It rains almost every day, and even when it isn't raining, there's always a nasty dampness in the air. The threat of rain, sort of thing. The autumn leaves are pretty much all on the ground, and they're definitely NOT pretty after mixing around with smelly gutter rubbish for a month or two. It is not romantic when the wind blows them out of the slurry and straight up one's nose. As if that weren't bad enough, there are almost no sunlight hours, so everyone's depressed. Financially speaking, November is a disaster month. There's Christmas shopping to be done, after all. I'm not buying anything for anyone this year. I'm just going to give everyone drawings, and if they don't like it, they can jolly well lump it, as my mother would say.

On another note entirely, I simply must stop saying 'yobbo'. It lacks class. Only yobbos say 'yobbo'.

And that's all I've got to say for myself at the moment. I don't have much of a life outside of painting and drawing, so most of the time, that's what I'm going to be writing about here. Painting, drawing, and whatever I can scrape together about life in general*.

* [Footnote made in August of 2005] Funny, how little has changed!