today's trivia / end of mosquito season / what's up today?? / colorado painter lewis mcinnis / by Philip Tarlow

6:38 pm: so today was the first day i was able to correct 3 chapters of the actionlab curriculum. i did 2 chapters before going to the studio and 1 just now, before dinner. it was bit of a strain, but not too bad. especially with the growing awareness of just how unique and needed our educational product is. in addition, almost all the chapters are highly inventive and often amusing, so it's a fun gig! if i can keep this up, except for our trip to art aspen next weekend, i should be done by august 20 or 25. right on schedule for our IT team to take the ball & sprint to the finish line.

the toughest moments happened this morning, when my ocular migraine kicked in. if you've never heard of it, google it. it's a condition whose cause is unclear. the symptoms consist basically of a sudden onset of pixilation taking over part or sometimes all of your field of vision, usually in one eye, and lasting for 20-45 minutes. it seems to occur in spurts. so i had one today and one just 3 days ago, but previous to that i hadn't had one for 2 weeks. what was unsettling, even scary about this morning, was that it was the first time i had an episode while trying to do something visually demanding, like look at small print on a computer screen and scan for errors; either grammatical or simple spelling/punctuation mistakes. whereas previously, i just went about whatever i was doing, this time i found it very challenging to do what i set out to do. i should have just stopped and lay down till it passed.

so today in my studio, i located the image for parade 49, drew it on the 68"x18" portrait linen and prepared the stretcher bars for stretching tomorrow morning. i should be able to actually start the new painting by about noon. thank god i love what i do so much! thank god mikela loves what she does so much! thanks god we're in good health. and thank god we live in a place that is more a state of mind....an energetic than an actual place. no decent restaurants, but WTF; you can't have it all.

1:32 pm: trivia: today's watch choice=my Kenneth Cole with orange-grey-black NATO strap....ok, so it's a quartz movement. but just look at how the designers at k.cole nailed the design of the face, borrowing from the $47,000 a. lange & söhn you see next to it to create a stunning, functional watch costing under $100 ; my latest shaver kicks ass: a Philips Norelco model AT830/41; this morning's coffee was a blend of the 2 beans you see in the jars (the number 10 on the label indicates mikela's rating. her highest is 10+); peter schjeldahl's recent new yorker review of painter stanley whitney was a lot better than what he usually writes. he seems to me to be a very interesting painter, although i'd have to see his work in person. bottom row left: putting the freshly roasted (last night) and ground beans into the moka pot. yes i do use a whirly-blade to grind the beans. coffee aficionados cringe, but i gave the burr grinder a shot & it was a total pain in the ass. after not too long, the oil from the freshly roasted beans gunks up the mechanism & it's hard to clean. mind you, it wasn't the $500+ burr grinder.

LEWIS MCINNIS:

having said what i did about stanley whitney, i wanted to mention space gallery artist lewis mcinnis. we met him at the space gallery opening in denver on july 30. i think his work is very beautiful. both artists have had interesting mentors; whitney's was gustonmcinnis  knew diebenkorn. lewis is a sweet guy. we had a good talk and i'm very grateful i was introduced to his work, which you can see below. i joined space gallery recently, and this was the first opening i attended. michael burnett, director of space, can be seen bottom left, and below right: one of burnett's elegant pieces in oil & resin on canvas.

1:06 pm: just located the image for parade 49, which will be 68x18". by the way, in the photo below right, the shmata (yiddish for old rag) around my waist is the mosquito netting jacket we ended up not needing this morning. mikela just visited me in the studio. gentleman that i am, i walked her back to the house. as i turned to leave, i said "i like to throw words around like sacks of sand." 

7:16 am: the temperature at 6am, when we took our morning walk, was 47F. for the first time since the start of our mosquito season in late june, there was not one to be seen or heard. we increased the distance to 2 miles, half of which is uphill. we average 3MPH, take 4,425 steps and do it in 38:44 minutes. by mid september, and once we've started hiking up north crestone trail 2X a week in the afternoons, we should be ready for our long awaited hike up to north crestone lake: 3.5 miles up, 3.5 miles back down.

today is the first day of my 3 chapters a day push, to get all the chapters in the actionlab curriculum corrected and ready to load onto our beta site at the end of the month. in addition, i'll choose an image for my next parade series painting, and begin editing video i shot of our pop-up restaurant dinner last week.

and yo, sens8 was renewed for FIVE YEARS on netflix. watch it! the watchowsi team is in another league, crafting a tv serial that feels and looks more like an excellent flick.