Painting this picture was a war. I decided to let it be for now and maybe come back to it later. Occasionally it happens to me, that I am painting and nothing goes how I want it. Sometimes I have to take a break from painting to reset completely. While painting this one, literally everything went wrong.
My biggest mistake was to start with a pure black underpainting. I don’t know, what I was thinking. Making it simply black has been just stupid and I did not achieve by that any nice patterns to glaze over. Then I realised, lightning was fairly difficult. I wanted dramatic sky, but one still needs to have foreground sort of interesting, not just a grey blob. And then those trees! By that stage was I honestly considering just pushing my fist through the canvas while screaming something terrible (I was stopped only by the worry that I could confuse and scare neighbours and their two newborn babies. Eh, age made me soft… )
So yeah, this is the result. I am not happy with it whatsoever, but I guess I should learn to live with it for now. Maybe it will not appear so awful to me in half a year. Otherwise I can still turn to my original plan…
Otherwise last weeks has been awesome. We have officially became ‘Pflegestelle’ for the cats from animal shelter. I have been so excited about this! Pflegestelle means a temporary home for the cats, which would normally have to be in the shelter. They have better time and they get better accostumed to people, until some nice person takes them for real. In our current situation we would not be able to care for the cat long term, we still want to travel. Also finding a flat is fairly difficult already without animal. Like this we all get what we want – we get a cat to cuddle and cat does not have to rot in the shelter. Win – win.
Our cat to look after is the funniest and sweetest animal in the world. She is fairly smart and man, is she lively! She is so much fun. She refuses to sit on one’s lap, instead goes crazy from joy if you lay next to her on the ground. She purrs and bumps her little had with all the force into my forehead, then she licks my hand with her little rough tongue and proceeds to gently chew on it, going almost crazy from happiness. I never imagined cat would get excited about a person so much. It is unimaginably cute.
This morning I have read in the news that Pope Franciscus made some claims against couples getting animals instead of children. He called them selfish. That made me angry. I had much higher opinion about current pope, perhaps too high. I had the feeling that unlike so many other church authorities he understands that life is much more complicated than this. Until now I found he does many good things for old-fashioned and often very bigoted Church. Well, apparently even the pope is only a human. Even though I am not sure, if I am allowed to claim something like this, considering Papal infallibility. Does it make me Protestant..? Pope seems to be against family planning and to some degree also against pets. Apparently it is better to have children and be an awful parent than to work on your issues and have a therapeutic cat or two. Omg, how selfish!
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