A Scene in a Flowery Field

Something I'm working on now, unlit and lit.

But mostly I'm working on oils. I'd like to do some commissioned portraits. For years I thought I hated working from photographs, but today I spent all day painting a portrait from a photograph, and I discovered I didn't really mind it. Maybe it's because oils themselves are so fascinating and still relatively new to me. 

I'm still reading In Search of Lost Time. It's so clearly written by an art historian and for art historians, that I'm surprised it wasn't required reading for my art history degree. It gives you such a strong sense of a time when art was much better appreciated and understood than it is today. 

A scene that was running through my head last night: Bloch's father proudly shows Marcel and Saint-Loup a painting that was made by, he said, Rembrandt. Marcel knew it was a forgery and keeps silent, but Saint-Loup naively asks where the signature might be? Bloch senior brusquely replies that it unfortunately had to be cut off the fit the frame, and hurries the boys out of the house. 

This scene is a great example of Proust's skill -- it seems perfectly lifelike and in character for each of the three men involved. 

We have mice, or squirrels, or raccoons in our attic, and I'm too chicken to go up there and see what it is.

Self-portrait

I painted all day today.

A lot of little sketches

Self-portrait

Re-reading Books

I love to read novels, but I find it very difficult to re-read them. The first time I read a good book, I'm captivated. Whenever I'm away from a book  I'm reading for the first time, I can't wait to get back into the world of the story. But when I'm re-reading, it takes some work to get drawn into it that way. 

Right now I'm re-reading  In Search of Lost Time, and it is harder to read than it was the first time, but I am finding new things in it. Like this quote, about a stand of trees that remind the narrator of something he can't place:

 "I could not manage to recognize the place they had, as it were, been separated from... and I had to ask myself whether this whole outing were not just some figment, Balbec merely a place where I might once have been in my imagination, Mme de Villiparisis someone out of a novel, and the three old trees nothing but the solid reality that meets the eye of the reader who glances up from a book, his mind still held by the spell of a fictional setting." 

Which is more real, a well-written novel, or real life?