Well, my friends, I am still struggling with my sumi-e and have messed up several paintings. I have found that newsprint works really well as practice paper and have decided that I need to work smaller right now. So I took a detour while I regrouped.
Last Friday, I did a Painting and Poetry tour for a middle school class. It was an incredible tour. They were studying poetry so all of them had read poetry, over half of the kids write poetry and when I asked for volunteers to read poetry I had more volunteers than poems to read. Unheard of! One of the poems inspired me to pull out a sheet of watercolor board and to start painting again. The poem is Sunflakes by Frank Asch and here are the first few lines:
If sunlight fell like snowflakes
gleaming yellow and so bright,
We could build a sunman
We could have a sunball fight
As I painted I began to think about sunlight flowing like water and, because I was starting with my “Krasner colors” of magenta and sap green, about Hawaii and the beautiful waterfalls we saw while in Hawaii. This led to light falling like a waterfall. Anyway – enough – here is Sunfall.