Acrylic on Copper

I began "painting" one year ago and hadn't touched a paint brush since Kindergarten. I started with 10 store bought primary colors, four cheap brushes, a spounge and a roller, plus some odds and ends from around the shop. My shop is a metal shop and I had a lot of sheets of copper about 12" x 18"

so that is what I painted on! I love painting on copper. The paint doesn't absorb and doesn't even stay where you put it. It has a life of its own. A year later I am running out of copper but

yesterday I made a discovery! These three "paintings" are on the same sheet and really exist only "in camera". I blob some paint in random colors here and there and hit this with the spounge and paint roller giving me some kind of background. Then I add "the flowers", a few leaves or whatever strikes me. I then take a picture of it then hit it with the roller again and start the process all over! I did six paintings on one copper sheet yesterday and the last one, six paintings deep is the only one that really exists! If you don't have copper handy this can also be done on kitchen foil. It is a lot different from painting on canvas and you can use the foil with your artwork on it for Christmas wrapping paper!

Modern Technology

Disneyland will wait and so will my "Summer Vacation" story. In discovering my Swan
photo from yesterday's blog I have realized that the photos of my youth are becoming like my memories: faded and torn and unorganized. My uncle had a really good camera, one of those "single lens reflex" kinds made in Japan. I didn't then and still don't realize what this even means, except to say he had light meters and all kinds of dials and buttons on his camera. My "Brownie Starflash" had one button, up close for portraits and flowers or moving this switch for landscapes and farther away photos. It was a camera for idiots and lazy people but it had this flash attachment which was so new for me! Even today my camera is a point and shoot although it has a lot of buttons and dials I almost always keep it on automatic mode and it thinks for itself.
My uncle lived in Washington the state north of us and would visit us about twice a year bringing a slide projector and screen with him and put on a show for us! I loved these and the concept of a little photo blown up big against the white screen. He traveled a lot for fun and for business and brought us pictures from China or India or the last exotic place he had been. Always photos with a story, an adventure! My father didn't really like these evenings but would watch them out of politeness to his brother and my uncle knew this so about every 20 pictures or so he would throw in a photo of a naked woman just to see if we were awake! I was eleven years old and very awake!
I eventually discovered that I could take slide photos with my "Brownie" camera and I was really happy with that! When we went to Disneyland I took three rolls of slide film with me.
When we returned I made popcorn for my family and put on a show and made them watch.
I still have those slides and went through them last night, digging out the same old projector
that was once my uncles, making popcorn and reliving those days and others.
I sorted out about 100 of them, from Disneyland, from old camping trips, from when I ran away when I was seventeen and went to Europe and even a couple old girlfriends and took them
to Walmart to be put on a CD. Wow, how times have changed, a hundred pictures, my entire youth, put onto a little plastic disk! If I get them today I will tell you about Disneyland tomorrow! M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E!