"Spring and Fall"

(5x7) Another little study (also on hot press, as was yesterday's): I was trying to concentrate on showing the shapes, rather than the details within them, to delineate the scene. I see the perspective of the path is off: if you're doing shapes, get them right! I see I've done it again, what every art teacher I've ever had says is a no-no: divided the page exactly in half. I do it all the time, without realizing it.Well, perhaps it's just an outgrowth of some aspect of my being: balance, not dynamism; calm, not tension. Today I'm going to fill my two new palettes: I'm doing a four-day workshop in Rehobeth, DE, with Ken Hosmer, and should start getting my kit together. Actually what I should do is stay home and work, but my friend Shelby, exuberant plein air painter and generous host, is letting me stay at her house, so how can I pass it up? I'm thinking of devoting one of Thumbox palettes (I bought two, of course) to "my" palette, colors I would normally choose, and the other to Jim Kosvanec's "essential" palette, which is not what I would choose--for one, he has four greens (out of fourteen colors!) and no purples or violet: no cobalt violet--a color I've come to feel I can't do without. (His "optional" colors, for an expanded palette of 21 colors, does included cobalt violet and ultramarine violet.) Might be a total disaster; might be a great shake-up! Here's one of the first poems I memorized (the others were Shelley's "Ozymandias" and Keats's "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"). I wish I had the time, and the brain cells, to memorize poems again--what a worthwhile thing to do! Hopkins's poems are just a pleasure to say, to pronounce the words, a characteristic shared, I think, by the poems of Wallace Stevens. Spring and Fall: To a young child
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving? Leaves, like the things of man, you With your fresh thoughts care for, can you? Ah! as the heart grows older It will come to such sights colder By and by, nor spare a sigh Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; And yet you will weep and know why. Now no matter, child, the name: Sorrow's springs are the same. Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed What heart heard of, ghost guessed: It is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for.