I’m feeling better than I was the other day when Joy and I got home from hospital. I am, but Joy is still not feeling so great.

Today’s watercolor experiment:

Since I was feeling better I thought I should arrange the desk to reflect my attitude. Besides, I wanted to start painting. With the desk in the chaotic condition that emerged from my neglect, I wouldn’t be able to paint or even be in the same room without breaking into a cold sweat.

My usual way of dealing with the increase in entropy of my desk, or room, or garage for that matter, is to make a clean sweep: remove everything, pair like things together and assign a final disposition. That last part is sometimes the hardest. If the ‘thing’ in question is useable in the immediate future, like a brush or a tube of paint, I normally have a place for it; I try to throw away non-useable items, ‘try’ being the operative word, but that is another story.

As a result of adding my own energy to my desk, I successfully reversed its entropy!

Clean Desk
9″x12″ 140# Cold Pressed Watercolor Block

Process:

The desk in our study belonged to my father. I love the fluted edge of the desktop. This is where I began painting. I made little Van Dyke brown arcs across the bottom of the page. The rest of the brown colored the desktop. Later in the process I sketched in the scratches with quinacridone nickel.

On the left side of my desk, I have a stack of papers, my blue pencil box, on top of that my little plastic box of charcoals. I could have made that plastic a bit more reflective and shaded the sides of the pencil box a bit more.

Moving clockwise around the desk is a green plastic pill bottle (colored with phthalo green), my red coffee cup, an (cadmium) orange pill bottle (holding art supplies), two other bottles of liquid latex, a ceramic teabag receptacle doubling as a paintbrush holder, a cast iron teacup and a yellow tennis ball. I had fun mixing colors for these items. For the most part, I mixed pigments with varying amounts of lamp black to get the appropriate shading.

Comment:

Yes, part of the desk is clear. I have too many things to use and not enough boxes to put them in, it seems. But that is beside the point.  Again, as in many of my watercolor experiments, I got the most satisfaction seeing more and more, the longer I stared at my subject (my desk, in this case). For instance a quick glance did not reveal the reflections of the cup and bottles on its dull surface.  I had to focus my eyes at a distance to really see them.  By painting in the reflections, as faint as they were, I made the desktop come to life, in a way.