New York Visit

When I was in Manhattan over the Easter Week-end, I revisited some of my favourite paintings.  The "Cezanne Cardplayers" at the Metropolitan has a wonderful quality of rich colour and mark-making.  The Van Gogh painting of cypress trees caught the eye of my two granddaughters; the dark outline and the clear blues and greens were sparkling.

Making Mistakes

Reading a book called "The Paper Garden" by Molly Peacock.  It is about a woman who, at the age of 72, started to make amazingly-detailed collages of flowers.  They look very realistic, and yet the pictures are made by cutting out pieces of paper and gluing them together.  This is what the author says about perfectionism:  "Great technique means that you have to abandon perfectionism.  Perfectionism either stops you cold or slows you down too much.  Yet, paradoxically, it's proficiency that allows a person to make any art at all; you must have technical skill to accomplish anything, but you also must have passion, which, in an odd way, is technique forgotten."