Having budget problems is never fun. When the year began things were looking pretty tight in the laboratory and when I made a budget estimate for the year it occurred to me that we would come up short on funds. Hence the doodle of the plane crashing. It wouldn't be long until the COVID-19 lockdown, which ironically solved my laboratory budget problems by temporarily pausing everything, disrupting two graduate students start time, and the University awarded us extra money to recover lost experiments. So in the end we are good for the year and should be able to get the laboratory up and running full speed by the fall. What does all this have to do with the painting? I made this painting from a number of doodles I did in my lab note book which I have at home now. The outlines were done using phthalo blue, which is a trick I got from studying some old Hokusai prints that used blue outlining. The rest of the design was coloured in with mostly warm earth and synthetic paints. There are plenty more doodles in my twenty second lab book (I started taking lab notes in 1998), in fact, Hiking Elvis was from this book although I erroneously thought it was lab book #23 at the time of naming that painting. It doesn't really matter, the naming of this series has been somewhat chaotic and random anyways. 15 x 22" cold press, watercolour, August 2020
No comments:
Post a Comment