Not-So-Black Lab

Not-So-Black Lab

Oil on canvas, 12x12, $350

Please email me if you'd like to buy this painting, or if you'd like me to make a painting of your pet

I am toying with the idea of bringing only 10 or 12 paintings to the Mystic Outdoor Art Festival. Four or five would be giant paintings, and the rest would be very small.  This could be a great idea or a terrible one, I don't know. I do know it is an interesting one.

I have a 48-inch by 60-inch canvas I got for something like $29 a few month ago at Jerry's Artarama in Hartford. I woke up very excited today about using this canvas for a giant cowscape I'd paint from photos I took of some long-haired cattle on the Gaspe Peninsula.

But Kaja, the big old chow-German shepherd, really needed a walk. She has bad arthritis in her back legs, and without the walks, she is stiff and bored. It's just been too hot to walk her much these past few weeks, but this morning, it was OK. So after I took everyone out for their morning pee, I beckoned to Kaja.

Well, Sam wanted to come, too. And the black dogs wanted to come, too. So the five of us set off into the neighboring conservation area, with me still in my jammies, and we poked and strolled and sniffed and explored, all the way there and all the way back.

Then, I really truly had to water the gardens. And I really, truly had to get four plants in before they died.

And then, between the dogs and Peter and me, the kitchen floor was a disgusting mess of tracked-in grass and dirt and spilled stuff and dog hair and dust. And so I swept and Swiffered.

I did all of this, then had breakfast, then did my email - and then one of the hugest thunderstorms I've ever seen roared in, with explosions of lightning and simultaneous thunder, and downpours so thick they seemed solid - and the power went out for three hours.

Artists are always telling me that they want to paint more, but they don't have the time. I always tell them that they have to make the time, that they can't continue to think of themselves as a dog-walker, or a gardener, or a cook or a house cleaner; they must think of themselves as an artist.

Great advice, eh?

At about 4 p.m., this dog-walking, house-cleaning, email-answering gardener-painter finally got down to business.

And you know what? It's all fine.