My mri showed, from what I understand, no concerns. So that means I don’t need to sit around fearing inevitable blindness. So hopefully I will be able to let it go, and focus my energy on finishing the book for my youngest daughter over the course of this fragmented week, and then get back to work on A Sick Child. There is also a student and faculty art contest at the South Bend Museum of Art that I want to have something new for, and although I’ve been able to work on some things over the past three months, I’m not sure I have anything that I want to enter in a contest.

I’m taking a pastel landscapes class with Cathy McCormick (and this is my first in-person, guided with assignments class that I’ve taken in art ever.) Her instruction has been invaluable. I don’t think that I’ll ever choose pastels as my first choice, but I’m definitely impressed with what they can do.

These are three paintings I’ve done since the start of the class. What I like most about the medium is that it is close to the same as drawing with vine charcoal, and there is actually vine charcoal in the darkest parts of all these. It allows me to work pretty loose and that forces me to stay away from fine details that will do little to improve the painting. I’ve got some larger canvases that I’m hoping to work with later to do some landscapes based on some of our trips over the past years so that we can cover up some of these imperfections in the paint in our house…I mean to make the walls look less bare.

This last one was done on the “chicken wire” side of the paper. It has more bite than the back side of the paper, and Cathy warned me not to use it, she warned all of us not to use it, but I did it anyway, and I immediately regretted it.