Sunday, 20-Jan-19 20:58:54 CET

Hanna 20 Januray 2019

It is Sunday, January 20 of 2019. I am on my way to the life painting session at de Stoker in Amsterdam. It was a hectic week that I did not make time for publishing my blog from last Sunday. I worked a lot on the plans for our new plot. We need to design the plot, and it has to fulfill requirements from the municipality and the water management authorities and so on.

At the new years gathering of the future neighbors last week they said that if you had a proposal for how the group would share the costs for building the road they suggested one should send it. So I did that when I came home.

On Monday after we got a message from the municipality that our drawing of the plot had been accepted! That was great. It is the most important drawing I have made ever.

What then started is something of politics. It is outside the scope of this blog to go into details on that. I say what thinks and my ideas do not necessarily need to be accepted as the truth. One side of me loves the work of developing the algorithm and formulas. The other side of me just wants to go with the flow and accept anything for the piece of mind and not stick out.

What I made was solid. I was proud. The piece of mind part of me had to hold back this time when I presented my idea and getting into the pros and cons of my model versus other models.

Yesterday I received the news that the lawyer that the road society would hire to help with the setting up the society had died in an accident Awful news. He will not get to see my model.

It is sunny today. It is cold and crisp and sunny.

The artists today were Chef, Saskia, Floor, Lydia, Tom, Irene and me. The model was Hanna for the second time.

I had hoped that I could get another spot on the other side of the room, but Tom would not switch with me, so I had to stay. I could move a little further to the right. Irene got my spot. Today Saskia changed the light. She turned off one incandescent light. The result was more dramatic and more contrast. I liked that!

Since I wanted as much as possible of the model, I decided to cut her head a little. I know that this considered a “not done” by some artists. In photography, it is done all the time no questions asked. Another thing I experienced when doing that is that many other artists are missing one of their most important reference points. They can no longer estimate the lengths of the model, and often they estimate that the head is made too big. Earlier I listened to their advice and started making the head smaller but this is not the issue, and by doing so I destroy the painting. This time I went over my reference points again and made smaller adjustments.

It was feeling good to tell them they were off and stay with it.

It is a beautiful sunset. I need to be careful with my life. There is so much fun and important things to do. I want to see many more beautiful sunsets. I feel so sorry for the widow of the lawyer.