Sunday, 30-Oct-11 22:27:00 CET

Theme evening “Autumn” at Aquarelmere

On October 22 we had the theme “Autumn” at Aquarelmere. I did not bring so much material myself so I hoped for that I could make a painting of the still life rests of the others.

I got hold of something that looked like a Cotoneaster branch with red berries. It is a botanical wonder that I could figure out this and a little help of Google obviously. Google knows everything! I think that the paintings have extra value when I know what I have been painting. My long term memory for botanical facts is 10 seconds long. Essentially I only know I have the right name for that thing in the clipboard memory of the computer so that I know I can paste it into my blog post. The funny thing is that I will for eternity know how a branch of a Cotoneaster looks like but I will not remember its name but I will remember that I wrote a blog post about it so that I can retrieve the information.

I feel awful about this. Had it not been great to remember botanical facts like the gurus in British gardening programs?

The autumn is the time of orange. Orange sunsets. Red, orange and yellow leaves. Right now the colors of the autumn are at its peak. Soon the first autumn storm will blow away all the leaves and make a red orange and yellow pile of everything and soon there will be brown debris all over. Why could not the autumn be a lot longer? Make the summer two weeks and then have the autumn two months instead. Would that not be great?

While painting the cotton thing I had seen that one of the other artists had brought a maple leaf. Great vibrant colors! The problem was that I was short of time and I had only one leaf. I had to improvise and work quickly, really quick. I finished the maple leaf in 30 minutes.

When I was done Wilma sitting next to me asked me “And the dark edges of the leaf? Are you not going to paint anything of those?” So I did and it was like the leaves lifted from the background as if the wind any moment would take a grip of them and blow them away. I was blown away of the effect this gave the painting. Thanks Wilma!