Work in progress / Color chart: purples

10/16.

Showing something in progress is like having a crowd watch me walk a tightrope (I don't like crowds much). With no one around it's a simpler matter of getting from A to B, and what might happen in between is my business.... So here I am inching along. Another hour and a half or so, but it didn't really shape up as much as it could have. I thought the other day that I was getting sick, but now it seems I'm just in one of those funks when I can't focus on what's in front of me (the kind that used to be much darker and lasted very long times). Or maybe I need to get a really good night's sleep.

Thinking about being sick only reminded me of the great ones who died so young, through no fault of their own, yet were able to create such great work. That's to say I don't mean Janis Joplin types who drank and drugged themselves to death. But those like the poet Keats who died at 25, and especially my painting hero Richard Parkes Bonington who died at the same age, only a month shy of his next birthday - both from tuberculosis. I know I haven't made the most of my time on earth, but I am grateful to be alive.

I left this piece at the point where I began to add the purple in the leaf at right, and then did a chart of purples: