Cold Day Again

This pastel was done this morning on Saint-Armand sabretooth paper. I like the paper very much. The canal is almost completely frozen over except for one area where some domestic ducks are keeping it open. People feed them so they survive as long as the fox doesn't get them.

The death of Andrew Wyeth has led to a renewed discussion of the so-called realist/abstraction conflict. In the book with the long title Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life Prof. Sam Wang writes of a person who regained sight after a life of blindness. He says that the person had to learn to see. The person couldn't judge distances, didn't understand space, and was fooled by "reality" leading to the conclusion that we learn what we see. In other words, there is no right way or wrong way to see, unless you are driving a car, or trying to use the crosswalk. In terms of making art, there is no right or wrong way to respond to the world by making marks on a surface, if that's your medium. Marks on a surface are inherently abstract, with varying degrees of resemblance to familiar things that we have learned.