My friend Steve

I stopped by to visit my friend Steve. It was late and very cold outside. I still needed to draw something before midnight to keep my streak of doing some art daily alive. I wasn’t sure what to draw. I wanted to go out and wander around some… see what caught my eye. But it was so cold outside and so warm and cozy inside. There were kids running around and a choice of hot coffee or cold beer. I really didn’t want to go out. I looked out his second story window through the dark night. I was intrigued with the abstract quality of the snow that covered the roof in the foreground and the yellow lights in the back ground that gave the scene some depth. I got out my permanent ink pens and did a sketch on watercolor paper. I went over it lightly with washes of lavender and yellow to give it some depth. It wasn’t anything special. But it kept my streak alive one more day.

The next night I begin painting it from memory as much as I could. Just going over it in layers the way I do. My memory wasn’t sharp enough to finish the painting completely. I went back to Steve’s a few day later and looked out the window and saw what I was missing. I kept going over until I was happy enough with it. The Oriental thought in art is to study your subject intensely to the point where you know how many strokes it will take you to complete the picture. More thought… less action. Or to be more precise more action in thought. My way… maybe the American way is to just jump in and get started and keep working at it until you like it. That’s what I did here. Sometimes it work other times it doesn’t.

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