Indian Corn

OK — I’m calling this “done”. It’s been a rough year. We had a huge rainstorm around the end of June that left my studio flooded with 6″ of water, And the back storage rooms had 12″ of water. The water was knee-deep out in the front yard:

t was a hellacious scramble to pick up everything and try to set it up, out of the water. All my paintings were wet. Frames, art books. A nightmare I hope to never see again. I’ve put a lot of things back into place, but it still looks like a cyclone had hit. Here’s how it looked inside the studio:

I’ll spare you the rest. Of course I could continue pecking away on this one, but I need to move on. Yesterday I found some caladiums at the plant nursery down the road that re-kindled my “old spark”. I’d recently decided to just leave the still lifes wait until winter — and devote my time to small plein air landscapes (the only things that sell around here). But now there’s the huge problem in this area of smoke from the Canadian wildfires. So maybe it’s a good idea to hang around inside the studio, painting caladiums….