LOCAL: I constructed two more cat shelters for the winter. I use a cardboard box nested in a storage tub. I put Thomas hay and cheap shavings inside. The space between the box and tub is packed with wood shavings. I affix a basket around the opening into the inner box with duct tape. It blocks the wind and adds a bit of cover when peeking out. I sold some pet rocks. What a week.
Drone: I flew none. Weather.
Science: Is sort of like economic data, but you publish it.
Art: I am painting something. I had a rough concept. Two similar panels. Each features a sonnet; each features an image of a washing machine or basement laundry room. The sonnet would come from a homage to a eulogy or funeral song from a Shakespeare play. Because my washer died, I needed to get a new one, and I needed to paint something to pay for the washer. However, I ask in all sincerity, are my paintings really worth all that?
No. So, I kicked it up with Shakespeare. That’s money, boom. I chose a poem which appears to be a unicorn in literature, a song written for a funeral in Cymbeline. It is really too long, and too repetitive, like pop music. As I understand it, the poem might have been written for the indoors Blackfriars Theatre for the King’s Men. Would have been a place to show an awesome deux ex machina to blow some M’deev minds. It was a goofy fabliau that Shakespeare, I opine without a shred of proof, would have loved reading and would be the sort of work circulating in certain circles. Tabloids and shock value. High dollar special effects.
I actually wrote the 24-line poem – not really a sonnet – in a fortnight. Then I generated some images in Midjourney. I chose one.
I asked ChatGPT to write a poem in the Cymbeline funerary duet style. The result was poetic, it had a fair boast of mechanical issues to mention, but without a human present in the drama. Okay. That’s the bones of the first panel. I transcribed the chatbot poem, sealed the canvas, then decorated the lower half. Ready for finishing.
So, I needed to create my own painting of a washer for the second panel. I just sat down and sketched the unit, but I changed some features. It is just a few feet from my paint kit. Easy. I blocked out the poem, then sealed the graphite, decorated the flower half. I painted the basement laundry. I flooded the zone with poetry.
I go back to clean up the fonts and the pale-yellow wall, add rag strip colors to the rug this weekend. Varnish in January.
The image on the left was chosen from approximately four dozen generated images. I printed it on cheap copy paper. I cut it out roughly and glued it to the canvas. Then I covered it with gloss craft glue. I then glued down a dupe of the same image directly over it. The craft glue turned the blacks in the inkjet copy to green.
After the top picture was nearly cured, I peeled off the top of the paper and exposed the image in a desiccated, weathered state. I covered that with quick-drying medium, painted around the edge a bit, rolled the paint to get dendritic sort of patterns, then painted striped with leftover paint on the bottom, leaning into green, red, and brown. Stains.
I threw thinner at the canvases, then overwrote the poems with fat blue flat brushwork script. The image is torn, stained, patched, and weathered, just like clothes and fabrics.
It is in progress. It is about the death and replacement of a washing machine. I miss its brown noise.
Basically, the wall on the right panel needs to be neutralized. Is this sentimental? I am going to add the faint impression of a winter landscape in the washer, like it is a portal to somewhere in the countryside all grey in fog and rain with spots of dull color. Or not.
But I am already in the countryside. Stumped.
Still debating how to treat the blue font. I sort of like them hanging there, apparently words but indecipherable. I will do whatever it takes to make this worth the $800 I spent on this washing machine. I think it takes someone thinking this is Important. Or I wait for the light blue script to fade.
Falcon P & O 
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