Monthly Archives: November 2025

Out of the Ashes

Art, binging, Journal, Life

That’s, admittedly, a pretty intense title. It might be a little too intense for the subject. I had fun yesterday taking some paintings that weren’t working for me and reworking them. Successfully. There’s a feeling I get when a painting works, I don’t really know what qualities make it so. I guess it has something to do with composition, color harmony and unity. By “unity” I mean it holds together, has some kind of structural and thematic harmony. I can’t really put a finger on it but I know it when I see it. Yesterday I brought three paintings back to life.

I took a broad brush and fairly light color and just started painting them out, leaving spaces for the under layer to show through. I used a broad flat brush that came in a package of four and was labeled “disposable.” They seem to hold up to use and clean up well. I haven’t disposed of any yet.

I’m making an effort to draw every day and to write every day. I want to up my drawing game, I’m considering doing some figurative, representational work, I’m getting a little bored and frustrated with the abstract.

Streamed Under a Dark Sky a French mystery series. At times I thought it was a little too melodramatic, with a soap opera feel to it. But I also found it to be very suspenseful and they do a good job of not tipping off who the villains are. We really binged this one, watched all six episodes last night, stayed up till one.

Hoop Time

Journal, Life

Tonight is the opener for the Gopher Women’s Basketball team. Pretty much the only sport of team I pay any attention to these days. But I am kind of a fanatic about this team. It’s a little bit like being a Cubs fan. Fanaticism undiluted by years of frustration. I’ve been saying that they were going to be good this year for decades now. Last year I had high hopes but they were hit really hard by injuries. At this point everyone is healthy, I think they might be good this year. And by good I mean finishing in the middle of the B1G and making the tournament. The B1G is a brutally tough conference.

Another beautiful Fall day, I’m headed out to do some yard work.

An End to Reading

binging, Books, Journal, Life

I thought I was losing the ability to read. I can still read, but I’ve had a period where I thought I’d lost the will to read. I couldn’t concentrate, I had a hard time stringing five pages together in the novel I was reading. I thought that it was that I’d become hopelessly addicted to scrolling through social media or online backgammon. Or that my ADD had gotten so bad that I couldn’t focus for more than a few minutes. It couldn’t be the novel I was reading, Ride with Me, Mariah Montana by Ivan Doig, the third in the trilogy that begins with Dancing at the Rascal Fair. Dancing at the Rascal Fair is one of my favorite books, my introduction to Doig, one of my favorite authors.

I began to expect that it might actually be the novel. I’d had a hard time getting into a couple of his other later books. There’s this kind of corny metaphorical way of speaking that I’ve noticed in the West. A little of it goes a long way. And Doig lays it on pretty thick in this one. I realized it was starting to get really annoying. Occasionally he drops that “awe shucks” facade and whips out a passage of beautiful and insightful writing. But I finally just gave up, there was nothing that made me want to keep reading.

I remembered that I had a collection of short stories by Richard Russo, another of my favorites. I figured that would be just the thing to get me out of my funk. I read 50 pages, a lot for me, on the first day. Drama and humor in small New York rust belt towns. He wrote Nobody’s Fool, which was made into a movie starring Paul Newman. Good movie, better book. His Straight Man is the funniest novel I’ve ever read.

It seems to me that some writers lose their touch as they age. I’ve noticed this in Pat Conroy and John Irving as well as Doig. It’s a good thing that I get better as I age.

Beautiful crisp Fall day today, I had physical therapy in the morning and Beck and I took a short walk around the neighborhood.

I’m looking forward to the Gopher Women’s hoops team’s home opener tomorrow evening. I think it might be a fun season.

We finished Your Friends and Neighbors and started The Madness. I’ll give Your Friends… a B+. Madness looks promising.

Extremely Minnesota

Art, Life

We had a date night last night. We went to the opening reception for Extremely Minnesota, the Robbin Gallery’s annual juried exhibition open to all Minnesota residents. Then we headed over to downtown Robbinsdale and had dinner at Marna’s, a Costa Rican restaurant right on West Broadway. Great art, great food. It was a pleasant evening.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this here before, it came about during a long fallow period for posting, but I’m the president of the gallery board of directors. Lucky me. We had a record number of entries, around 150. Neither of the pieces I submitted were accepted. That’s not a big deal, that’s the nature of open, juried exhibitions. The pieces I submitted weren’t my strongest, most of my recent work has already been shown there and that disqualifies them. Many of my friends had work accepted though and that’s great.

The work is very high quality, maybe the best we’ve had. It’s worth a trip to Robbinsdale to check it out.

It’s a windy cloudy day. I’m staffing the gallery from 1-4 pm, which will give me some time to look more closely at the work.