Spots and Poppies

If you know me, you know that I love paint.  I love paint chips.  I carry a packet of them in my purse; a chip from each room in our house, just in case.  I love the smell of fresh paint.  I get excited when I have to paint a room or even more, to choose its color.  I agonize over colors.  I painted every square inch of the Yellow House inside and out.  And its barn and cottage.  And most of the Rye House.  I just have one more little room left to paint here and I haven't yet because I am still vacillating on color choices.  And I have to do some major prep work first too.  I love to look at color wheels and I have purchased both Benjamin Moore's and Farrow and Balls entire collections of paint chips.  When I go to buy paint, I ask them to wait and let me watch as they look up the recipes on the computer and measure in the pigments to add to the white base.  I especially enjoyed it when they used to adjust the settings and pull levers to get the paint pigments to squirt in to the cans.  Sigh.  Well, a while ago I came up with this brilliant idea to combine my love of art and paint mixing/choosing and painting all in one project.  And we needed to fill some hallway wall space with color down near the laundry room.  So I bought a huge canvas and lots of tubes of paint and other supplies and I drew 98 circles on to this canvas and then spent days carefully and so thrillingly mixing paints as I went from one circle to the next painting so that no two circles would be the same color.  It was like choosing colors for 98 different rooms!  It was a blast!  My husband laughed at how much fun I kept repeating that I was having as I painstakingly painted each circle and exclaimed my joy.

There is a song for each circle it seems.  I listened to Taylor Swift, Diana Krall, Maroon 5 and the Cary Brothers over and over from start to finish.

 Haven't decided if I am going to frame it or not.

Are you dizzy yet?

I had so much fun with the paint tubes and mixing paint that I decided to paint a picture of one of my favorite flowers, poppies, and in all sorts of colors that make me happy especially as so much white snow whirls around us outside.  Do you know we are due for another blizzard this weekend?  Another 1.5 to 2 feet!  I've been practicing light and shadow with watercolors lately so I decided I was ready to try my hand at acrylics.  I love how it turned out and for me I think it's a keeper.

 Now I'll show you how things look over at the Yellow House these days; I was over there yesterday to check on a leak from an ice dam.  Two more feet will accumulate on top of that this weekend.  Jeepers creepers!  Except for the ice dams and leaks, I am loving how absolutely gorgeous it is to drive around here especially in the sunshine and survey this beauty.

Today as we were leaving our neighborhood to go run errands we saw dozens of surfers in the ocean; the waves were huge.  We stopped a surfer who was getting ready to go out and we asked him what it's like out there (very cold on the face) and for a picture.  It was 15 degrees out, maybe less with the wind chill, 35 degrees in the water (we looked it up after they told us in the 30s), and getting ready to snow again.  

And last but not least for a nice day, beloved blue birds outside the window snacking on the ground.