Doing the trip.

This is the assembled group taken this afternoon.
back row- right to left
Ignat Ignatov, Jerome Green, Stapleton Kearns, Jeremy Lipking, Frank Gardner, Daniel Corey,
front row-
Rick Casali, Paul Schulenburg, Eric Merrell, Ian Factor, Ernesto Nemesio, Jeff Bonasia, Logan Hagege, James Coe.

Another day of rain today. When you go on painting trips you often get days when you aren't able to work outside because of the rain or snow. It is part of it. I have spent lots of days cooking up seascapes in some motel room waiting for the weather to change. But on this trip we have a great new model every day and room to set up 14 easels.We painted a different and equally fabulous model again today. I guess tomorrow is more of the same. I already have my location for the next outdoor painting all staked out, and it looks really good, but the rain has to stop first.

I wiped both of today's efforts out. Some of these guys paint figures every day. They do one shot small oils about 9 by 12. They are pretty good at it. I am amazed at their little figure paintings. I would love to take a year or so off and paint nothing but figures. I felt like a total amateur.

I guess tonight I will write about "doing the trip". Here is a phrase from the old hippie days which has passed from usage,, what the dictionary would call archaic. But I hope to revive it's use. Back in my hippie days if you and I were out playing our bongos in the park and you said,"I gotta go do the trip" that meant you had to go to work at the Octopus Car Wash. It was a job or a responsibility you had. It was what was required of you. Not optional. It wasn't necessarily an unpleasant task or something you dreaded, but you had to do it. For instance if you were cheating on your wife, and your friends knew about it, when she threw you out and put your record collection on the street, we would have said, "He didn't do the trip!" You didn't do what was required of you.

For me, landscape painting is "doing the trip". When I say to my wife that I am going out painting, I will usually say "Ive got to go and do the trip". Now I am waiting for the rain to stop so I can.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Snowcamp is filled. That took almost all week. Maybe I need to do a second session.