Final class in Portland. Feeling the loss of this support and the fear of starting with a new instructor. Questioning myself. It’s good. Loss, fear, questioning. All important.

I spent two hours on my last class painting then frittered the last hour. Instructor joked that the grades were already turned in, so do whatever. Which is actually always the case. The grades matter less than the doing whatever.

I played a game where I started with the four earth tones I had (the umber/sienna family), then closed my eye and grabbed the next color. With each color I also had to change tools. I used four different brushes, paper towel, fingers, a clay scraping tool, and a palette knife. Not intentionally, but not surprisingly, my first color and strokes resembled a forest fire (500+ fires burning in BC). Then I started adding paper on top of the painting. Then, I added my signature: a self portrait in grey scale. Sort of tied together the drawing class and the painting class as a final gesture for me.

When I got back home, I wanted to revisit drawing, and drawing what I spent my childhood drawing: horses. I wondered how it would feel to revisit. So I searched the web for images. I know I was no longer interested in the drama poses of my early days: no rearing, flying, fluffy manes!

I came across some nice b&w photograhs of fuzzy Icelandic ponies and chose one.