One More for the Recycle Bin

Wednesday was probably the worst day I’ve had with oil painting. Ever. Of course, since I’ve only been painting with oil for about 7 weeks, that’s not saying much, I’ll admit. I’m sure that many more bad days at the easel await me in my future. How’s that for optimism?

In all honesty, I have to say that the entire day was awful. No, wait. It started out fine. I spent time enjoying the wonderful whirlpool tub my husband installed for me, plus, I was looking forward to painting. On Tuesday morning I’d bought a few new tubes of oil paint, including a red ochre that I was excited to try.

But then the day took a downhill turn. My mood soured a bit when I went in the back room to do a bit of housecleaning. I looked at all the paintings there — some finally dry, others still in the drying process — and I considered how many of them would be painted over. I do have a few I like, but most of my paintings have been relegated to what I call my “recycle bin”. They’re simply waiting their turn to be re-used.

While I was there I tried to retrieve messages from voicemail, only to discover that I’d lost the instructions on how to do it. Those instructions also had the PIN code written down. I tried several that came to mind. None worked. Finally, I found the instructions, tried again, and discovered that I was now “locked out of your voice mail portal.” Great. I figured a simple call to our ISP would resolve the issue. Wrong. It took several hours and several phone calls before I was able to get back into the system to get the messages — neither of which was important.

I figured I might as well give Amazon customer service a call, too. I’ve been having problems with my old Kindle. Again, the process involved several phone calls, and in the end, the news wasn’t good. Apparently it’s time to bid a fond farewell to my antiquated device. Oh, but the tech was wonderful about it. “I have bad news and good news for you,” he said. The good news was that Amazon was giving me a nice credit toward the purchase of a new Kindle.

By the time I started to paint, my enthusiasm had waned. I had hoped to paint some glorious autumn trees, and I really wanted to try out that red ochre. Sadly, after wiping off the canvas and starting over three times, I gave up. I just couldn’t do anything right.

The best I could manage was a fairly-decent sky, and from a distance, the tree-covered hills are all right. Maybe. I’m not even showing the entire painting because the rest of it is so hideous, but here’s the good part:

Actually, the more I look at it, the less I like the tree-covered hilltops, and if I look longer, I’ll probably decide that I hate the skies and clouds, too.

The painting is destined for the recycle bin, and no, I never did open that red ochre. I’ll save that for another day when things are going more my way.