I'm not colorblind, you know. I've just got no concept of color- I'm not cut out to be an artist or an interior decorator. I mean, I know the color wheel. I know all about complimentary and adjacent color schemes and shiz like that. I just can't put it into practice...

Coloring stuff is a bitch, especially when you're not relying on outlines to tell you where things are supposed to go. But right now I'm doing flashbacks to art one back in freshman year, the unit on surrealism...because I've always like Magritte beter than Dali, if only because I've a minimalists appreciation for simplicity.

Too many words, too many colors- life is chaos enough, life is art enough- should not our own personal art be the eye of the storm?

Frenetic simplicity...this picture always disturbed me slightly, which is probably why I never actually turned it in; extra credit done on a scrap of watercolor paper with watered down tempera paints. I always liked cubism better, though Picasso was a bastard and Braque should have gotten more credit. Cubist painting was fun; a wine bottle, a pomegranite, three mirrors, a coil of wires. Soft, smooth, shining curves turned into crystaline facets gleaming...and if you mix enough water into the tempera paint, you can almost pretend they're water colors, only less finicky, and if you hoarded dry paper towels and pressed them against the paint as it dried, they would leave a texture, raised and bubbly on the paper...and it was green and brown and red and dry yellow, and it was supposed to go to teen arts, but because it rained it did not...the judges saw it and commended the style and colors.

The picture that I'm talking about now, though, is something different. We watched movies in that class, all the time. Movies about artists and movements and Calder's circus. And I would take notes in my maroon and orange Virginia Tech notebook and doodle in the margins with gold gel pens. "I am Da-LI!" we would laugh at each other and sketch, then paint, and usually mutter jealously over Cathy's work and shake our heads over Andrea, and laugh at whatever Mr Miley had to say. The assignment was one surrealist painting, and I took chess pieces and seagulls and half open doors and placed them in a multihued sky and hated it. Then I took a face and placed it in space, and...I might still have the original in my closet somewhere. But it's time to recycle old ideas, and black tempera paint really doesn't capture a black sky very well, so...now I can do it with my tablet and make it even more disturbing the second time around.

...So, the CD player has gone from Carmina Burana to Cuban jazz to Eileen Ivers to George Winston...there should be one more CD on the loop...I am curious as to what crack will play next. I have The Persuasions Sing The Grateful Dead version of "Ship of Fools" stuck in my head.

How strange.

It's some sort of smooshy romantic jazz. Ugh. What was he thinking?