OK now the Danae is finished

Ok I went back into the Danae and changed the color of one of the falling books from yellow to a lavender with a yellowish spine and corner tabs. I love this painting. I think it will look great in our new home in Durham. Even though we don't have a new home yet, and we're still living in the old one. And our old one is still unsold after three days. Where are these people? This place is a bargain. I hope one day to do a painting as rife and recondite with symbolism as Bronzino's Venus, Cupid, Time and Folly. What a wonderful painting. I also hope to become more expressionistic like DeKooning. But the end of it all is continuing to find and use my own voice - to be wary of working in the vein of another.

The Danae is completed

I decided that applying more paint, tightening up the color and composition, worrying over the over all balance, and gilding the lily any more were not things I needed to do. I think a painting invites a perpetual involvement, a good deal of the art is knowing when to say "enough." In art you learn that even the best works go out into the world displaying their flaws. It is a conceit to believe that something can be so well done as to be flawless. Flaws are in many ways what adds life. Or I should say "so called" flaws. Flaws lead us into areas of investigation we'd never think of. I have learned over the years not to be afraid of my flaws but to love them. We can always be better, but never perfect. Perfection (and a more dubious word has never been spawned: consider how we interpret "be ye perfect" in the sermon on the mount what would rather be translated as "be mature" or "grow up into the description of God as loving as described in the preceding verses" - how much mischief is caused by that idea of perfection, that holiness is somehow being afraid of the trembling of a tea cup and having spit shined shoes) is a deadness, from what I've observed. I've never seen something with the label of perfect that didn't seem lacking in life.
Of course I use the word "perfect" sloppily. As do most people. It's just about as meaningless as the word "great" or "greatest". Is it really perfect that I've found a parking spot in front of the store? Or else I use the word ironically. What about when something is perfectly flawed?
Nature is perfectly flawed. No straight lines exist in it. No entire circles. The earth: not a perfect sphere but oblate and set at an angle. Nature is all asymmetry: as are we. Yet it is a perfect world: just the right distance from the sun and made of just the right compounds of chemicals at the right temperature. We don't know how else to define life, but that we expect otherworldly life to conform to some observations of ours projected onto them. How flawed. But it makes perfect sense.
Years ago, when I was in high school, and suffering artist's block, afraid to spoil the perfection of a page, second guessing by second guessing, I broke through when I determined that I would call nothing a mistake. I took that damned internal editing function on and turned it off. I now say that art is a choreographing of mistakes and accidents. I work at making all my mistakes work together. I let my mistakes live.

Much further along now

Locked in a tower: She thinks, "I had a life. I was going somewhere. Every day I'd read: plays, poetry, novels. And I practiced my music. I lived a life of expectation. I had my eye on some boys and loved to go dancing. I was princess of the kingdom. And then one day some drunken priest my father was bar-hopping with spewed out some nonsense where his daughter's son would kill him. Dad tried to dress it up to me as some oracle wrenched from the soul of the pithian navel. But I knew priests love to plant these ideas in king's minds. It's as if they live to get fathers to sacrifice their daughters. Let me tell you about my friend Iphegenia - dead on a mountain so her father could get better gas mileage. I ask where will it end? Old men live in fear and are easily manipulated. What did Laius think? That Oedipus, a little infant, would stab him with a rattle? My parents and their friends creep me out. Here I am in a tower, reading, bored, and one day I look up and there's Zeus. I just knew it was him, even though he was as slight as a beam of light, all golden, and it seemed that gravity couldn't hold him. He moved swiftly and covered me with warmth. I was in heaven. But Zeus: he never writes, he never calls. What is he up to? I need him now because dad suspects. I'm sure of it. I'm five months along. I'm over eating and having mood swings. Yesterday I tore up a bunch of books and made a large paper mache glider to fly off the top of the tower. What was I thinking? I'd have broke my neck. More and more I ask why, why can't we talk; why can't we talk and dad could be a grandfather to the boy? Is talking too much? Must we be subject to the drunken mouthings of oracular nitwits? "