In Good Company?

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for. ~Georgia O'Keeffe

For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh. ~Georges Rouault

Yesterday I was excited about creating a picture, feeling like I am taking steps in getting back to normal. But I got to thinking today, that artists are crazy!! Trust me, I worked in an art museum while I was in college--and I met some weirdos. We all heard the stories of how van Gogh cut off his ear and mailed to the girlfriend who dumped him. He was a very frustrated man, who only sold one piece of art in his lifetime. To me his work that the world is so in love with today, reveals a bit of his insanity. Of the French impressionists a couple died of STDs; most drank and kept mistresses; one died of pneumonia because he didn't have enough sense to quit painting and go home when it started raining. Even those who were morally sound were considered a little weird. The most well known, Monet lived a long time with a married woman, finally marrying her when her husband died. He spent his later years painting nothing but lily pads. Lily pads! Not a frog one. And Picasso's paintings are downright demented, IMHO. Georgia O'Keefe, a loner, never married and had a nervous breakdown. I read a book that featured American women artists; they were all divorced because they'd forget to do important things like fixing dinner, they couldn't reconcile domesticity with art.

People who have dominant left brains are the logical ones; the ones good with numbers, where as the artistic tendencies lies in the right side of the brain. Numbers frazzle my mind which makes balancing the checkbook a challenge. If you give me an address to drive to, I have to keep it in my hand referring to it often, while I drive. I do better with directions like, "Get off at the Park exit, drive past the red barn, turn right at the blue house and left where the three mules live." I am definitely right brained. Maybe I am a little crazy. Hopefully my ear is not in any danger. Don't open any damp packages from me.

The picture is Cheryl's Butterfly. My friend, Cheryl, took a picture of the Monarch in her garden and sent it to me which I used for this painting, and I gave her the work for Christmas. Hummm... there is not a frog in this one either.