The weather has been freakishly spectacular in Napa. Over 70, warm, breezy. Beyond fabulous but there's a couple of downsides to this weather nirvana. One down side is that the plants, and namely fruit trees are being faked out into thinking it's time to swell and bud...no, no, I say. Go back into your sweet place of winter dreams and don't be thinking about blossoming now.
Problem with all the budding is that if we get a late winter or freeze, that weather can knock down buds, hence sending the fruit of the summer to the dirt of the early (fake) spring.
boo hoo.
Also, with a non wet winter some summer drought. Drought. Dry, parched, wetless, heatfull drought. (do I know how to make up words or what?!)
Born and raised in California, not far from Napa, in what is called the "inland valley", I was a child of the seventies. Yes, I am that old.
I'm not sure if the expression was born during my youth, but we came to practice the catch phrase suggestion: "yellow mellow, brown down"
Think about that for a moment.
eww.
Not to mention brown lawns, dried up hillsides, ripe for fires, guilt at the gesture of watering plants in the yard (wait till the sun goes down)
Geesh, am I going on.
Hope it rains. (that's what I could have said in the beginning)
So, spring cleaning....the studio. I recently delivered and shipped out paintings and was left with a fairly empty, between projects space and more importantly have recently added square footage to my space! About seventy square feet plus a window, which is soooo vital in an artists space.
Once again, pulling out the paint cans, I painted my bullet riddled wall panels (not really bullets~ nails and screws would be more accurate) painted over everything in a fresh coat of white and yes....
repainted my studio floor plus the main shared space of the studio.
The paint and dirt riddled disaster of a floor was really visually distracting and not in a Jackson Pollock-y cool way of drips and dribbles but in a what a filthy, paint-glue-varnish-dirt-coffee spills-mystery shmutz kind of way.
(if you can make it out, that mannequin bottom is the best paper towel holder I've ever had, and sassy too!)
Gone.
Now lovely once again.
When I posted about painting my floor in days of yore, about two years ago, I had a comment from a reader who said they'd never seen a blog post with the word "shit" in it so many times.
Uh, thanks.
