Five Visits Ben

Friday 04/09/2009

Let me burden you with my tale of woe and this doom laden painting.

It all started a few weeks ago when, whilst pretending to be ninja (yes I know - I've put it all behind me now), the heavens opened and the first session was a wash out. (This you will recall from previous blog.)

I sneak back to have another go and I think it went alright. But the whole road has this old camber thing going on and so I end up painting all the buildings leaning backwards. It's another write off.

3rd time lucky and last week I went down full of hope, the sun was shining and I was confident of rescuing the painting. I set up and was ready to go only to discover I hadn't brought any brushes with me. I managed to slink away without too many witnesses. 3rd time was not lucky at all.

So here I am again on my 4th visit with the painting still a long way from completion and what happens - there's a bloody great big builder's van in the way so I have to move positions. There's builders everywhere with multiple vehicles as they work away on what seems to be a whole row of houses on my right. I persevere - I'm here now and there is some sun and I do have some brushes.

One of the builders does some star jumps for me in the middle of the road. Which is nice. I think of something really witty to say, but not quick enough to deliver the pithy line before he's gone back into one of the houses and not really funny enough as evidenced by the fact that I'm not going to write it down here.

I hear a few snippets of conversation, "can't do any more here ...", "back on Monday ..." and maybe my lucks turning - they are doing what builder's do best and moving on to another job without finishing this one! Hurray! He moves the van and the road opens up a bit. I do make some progress!

The old camber thing still causes me problems, but the ones on the painting I can resolve - it's my back where it starts to tell. Standing on the angle for a couple of hours is as much as I can take and I call it a day. Five visits it is then.

Later and more angst ridden angsty angst as I grapple with my artistic dilemma over what I should be painting in the studio. I started a few more Thailand ones last week so I'm going to finish them off anyway and I'll deal with the artistic fall out later. Here's the one I did today: