This morning I spent a couple hours painting at Sheep Hill with Valeri Larko and her students. One person said that my painting's parts were moving. Maybe because everything is topsy-turvy, which is not all my fault since the splendid barns are topsy-turvy.
One more Corot anecdote: Corot spent six years, from the age of 19 until 25, working in different cloth merchant shops. His father was trying to get him trained in the family business, but Corot was indifferent to the idea for a long time. Awareness of cloth and textiles would later show up in the various costumes he acquired for his models to wear. But, according to the story, he chanced to see a work by the English painter Richard Parkes Bonington in a Paris shop window, and, as a consequence, became determined to pursue a career as a painter. The story is considered 'apocryphal' but something did happen to Corot at the age of 25. When he went to Italy a couple years later to paint plein-air, he was older than most of his fellow artists, and his maturity helped him considerably to assume the role of a budding master.
