Tuesday, September 19, 2023
Things I miss
As readers here know, I lost my dad this past March. As the days have gone by since then, there are things I miss, of course. Some of them are very different than what I expected.
It's normal to say that you miss calling your dad up to get his advice on something. The truth is that when I called my dad up to tell him about something in my own life, he wasn't much of an advice-giver, and I'm not sure I really wanted any. Instead, he might say "huh!" and then pivot to something he heard on the radio that had him worked up.
Which, frankly, is what I miss.
I also used to make a lot excuses to be nearby when he was painting. One might think that you could wait until he was done and then appreciate the work, but that would be wrong in two ways. First, if you waited you would lose the experience of actually seeing him work, of seeing him choose a color and think and then blend it with something else and then think some more.
The other thing about seeing him create is that the finished work was often very different than the intermediate steps; in truth, there were several paintings on the way to the finished version. Consider the picture above. He is working on an image of a stout woman who seems to be wearing a blue mask, as so many of us did during the pandemic. I have never seen another painting that shows that bit of our common reality in 2020-21. And you can't see this one, probably-- it's likely he painted over that part and changed it all up as he wen. I had to be there in that spare moment to see that image.
And I miss that, too.
Comments:
Your blog brought back so many good memories. He worked on many variations of that painting over the years, but never finished it. The blue mask was temporary. I recently found the photo he was using as reference, and I think that it was taken in Italy. I especially loved the spot of paint on his left jaw. He almost always had a spot of paint on his face or an ear or in his hair after a painting session. I'm so glad that you took that picture.
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Your blog brought back so many good memories. He worked on many variations of that painting over the years, but never finished it. The blue mask was temporary. I recently found the photo he was using as reference, and I think that it was taken in Italy. I especially loved the spot of paint on his left jaw. He almost always had a spot of paint on his face or an ear or in his hair after a painting session. I'm so glad that you took that picture.
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