2:10 pm: so i ended up not painting today. my plan is to go to town later this afternoon & pick up an abstract collage on canvas i have hanging there. i'll bring it to my studio & start working over it tomorrow morning. it will become the 5th in my grey series.
a few minutes ago i re-shot this painting, as a test of my new nikon d7200. i think the results are better than anything i've shot of this painting using previous equipment.
yannis skouloudis stands, in his characteristic pose, in front of his shop, a general store in chora, capital of the island of andros. he spoke with a lisp, and would always offer us coffee as we passed by; an offer we sometimes took him up on. he represents a chora which is now but a memory. small, humble shops lined the main street, which was closed to traffic and paved in marble. there were, as yet, zero tourist shops, which catered to the zero tourists. familiar figures sat and sipped their "tourkiko" coffees in tiny white cups. new borns were shown off, wheeled slowly down the street by their proud mothers. it was, in many respects, a version of dylan thomas' under milk wood. everyone knew everyone, what they had for breakfast, innocent local scandals.....and andonis polemis might stride by carrying the latest newspapers just in from the port of gavrion. skouloudis was just one of many local merchants, shoe makers, workers drawn and painted by my then mother-in-law niki karagatsi and i during our long lazy summers on andros.
9:12 am: the wind made loud noises all night. moans; cracks; whooshings; skizzy creaking sounds as it squeezed it's way through the faintest cracks in our aging window frames. an exciting night, it was! it gusted to 50mph at the peaks, blowing fresh snow horizontally in sheets of ghostwhite abandon into the space of the crinkled skyscape.
will i put brush to canvas today, finally? we'll soon see.
