I learned about Oblique Strategies from Robert Genn's Painters Keys Blog.  These little dilemmas are a creative way of getting out of thinking ruts.  On Friday, I turned over the next card in the deck and read, "Do nothing for as long as possible."  This is an existential question and I could write a million blogs on it.  But that would be incredibly boring.  What its really about, I decided, is making use of guilt. 

Sometimes I do nothing for a couple of days just to build up enough guilt to get going again.  The block study above is my 44th and I did it on Thursday after a couple of non-painting guilt days.  The 45th study on Friday wasn't going well and I needed to fix it.  When I went outside I forgot the little step down to my patio and I fell down, my left foot twisting in the little sandals I was wearing.  Half the skin on my right palm was scraped off and I knew there was something seriously wrong with my foot.  Jones fracture they said at the emergency room. Update: the orthopedist says I have an avulsion fracture which is a lot better than a Jones facture, which often doesn't heal.  So my outdoor paintings days are not numbered.

Now it would be quaint, even if true, to say that the universe was trying to teach me a lesson about doing nothing for as long as possible, because I have been forced since Friday to lie down with my foot elevated and iced.  And to wear a therapeutic boot and use crutches making the simplest of tasks tediously time-consuming.  But the real moral of this story is that if you are painting outdoors and you have your head in the clouds, don't wear silly little sandals that can screw up your balance. Wear your hiking boots! I know if I'd been wearing my Renegade GTX Lowa Hiking Boots, the ones I wore every day painting in China and hiking this summer on Mt. Rainier, (or even my Crocs for that matter), that the 5th metatarsal in my foot would still be intact.

My friend Barry Raybould, one of the two guys I went with to Yunnan Province, China, last March, (the other friend is Timothy Tien) has been talking about block studies ever since I met him.   This was my summer project--block study/still lifes in outdoor natural light.  I painted this one about a third of the way through my goal of 50 studies.  When I got halfway through, I forgot why I was doing it, which forced me to do things I'd never done, like go read the Henry Henshe facebook page to try to understand what the purpose of painting colored blocks in natural light was all about in the first place.  I realized I didn't know the first thing about what the block studies were for and so then it got interesting again.

Meanwhile, I entered a couple of plein air competitions in the Northwest and won awards in each one.  This painting won an award from juror Xiaogang Zhu at the Whidbey Island US Plein Air Open September 12, 2009.  Maybe the block studies are paying off.  I am beginning to see everything as a big block study.

Driving in fog in the area of Coupeville on Whidbey Island, we came across Ebey Road Farm with a red barn and Holstein cows, the only bit of contrast and color we could find.  Parking by the "no trespassing" sign, we walked up the road past the house and said to the guy in the truck, "please sir, could we paint your cows?"  He laughed at us, of course. "The cows won't stay still!" he said. 

Yet we drove around to the other side of the barn and set up our easels in front of a small group of most curious cows, vying for position on the other side of the fence.  The two guys fixing the roof on the big barn were singing, the sun eventually came out and the rather busy cows (busy trying to figure out what we were up to) followed the alpha gal from one end of the fence to the other, took a lunch break on the other side of the barn, and finally came back and settled for a rest facing west, with their backsides in our direction. A little sweet talk with some grass brought them around and I was rewarded with a kiss on my hand from the long pink tongue of the most forward and courageous cow.  A little quick sketching between laughing heartily at the antics of these amazing animals made for the best morning of the week.  I wouldn't have missed it for anything.