Émile and I have been listening to Joni Mitchell, For the Roses. Okay, I am listening. He might just hear it. Either way, it's taking me back (oh so long ago) to the post college days, when I first heard the record on a real phonograph, in a house on a hill looking over Galway Bay on Innis Mor. It was just up this street (pictured), and up the hill from the church you see, where I was working on a farm as part of the WWOOF program. The lyrics are so clever and surprising that I still laugh when I hear them. It makes me see the big blustering sky of the westermost point in the old world. Maybe some day I can be that playful! (photo credits to wanderlustgirl and these folks.) Perhaps it is a mistake to try out a different style of painting while I am adapting to a new baby. It is difficult to think about anything too deeply, with the interruptions and the stress. Nevertheless,
I am working on an art journal entry for the course I am following with Willowing, called "Art, Heart and Healing." I'm struggling with how I want to approach the question of color. Limit color to the bare essentials, like an Alex Katz painting? Or go explosive and rainbow, overwhelming the senses until they submit, and see twenty colors as one tame beige? I guess most of the painters I admire limit their colors: Alice Neel, Joan Brown, Richard Diebenkorn, Jean-Édouard Vuillard. The only one I can think of who doesn't is Lucian Freud, but that is hardly colorful. Franz Marc? Max Beckmann? The latter is grim, and his colors are often brutal and emotional, not visually logical. Maybe I'm a Fauvist at heart. Hmm. 
Even that Andre Derain painting is more refined than what I'm working on. Isn't that a gorgeous painting of Henri Matisse, by the way? Oh well. Who am I missing as inspiration? Help!Lucy came home and helped me finish the journal entry. I love her pumpk
in and handwriting.