WATERCOLOR KIT

I had a dream that I was sitting on a sea of desert sand with my daughter.  Waves of yellow drift to the horizon, meeting the cornflower blue sky.  We were painting the sand and sky, yellow and blue.  Ever since, the old memories have returned, when we used to paint everywhere we’d go:

The patio at Harry’s Roadhouse, Santa Fe, painting the colorful string lights and yellow button “Tansy” flowers on the back of a napkin; pies in pie racks at various diners; painting the park from a park bench, cars and buses buzzing by, a suite of passing voices; down by the old muddy river at sunset, parting the tallgrass to get a better view of the snaking brown water as it turned into a golden mirror before our eyes; painting an old black on red olla that I smuggled back from Mexico.        

We kept a binder back then.  I remember it swollen and water warped in my hands, each page a treasure of pencilscratch memories and color, rough to the touch.  I want to paint.  I want to capture the color of the roses and hollyhocks, of the purple mountains in the distance, of the sky even when it’s gray with dust.  Watercolor, without technique, like Henry Miller.  Quickly.  Pencil and color like a child.  Like I used to do with my daughter. 

So I ordered some things in the mail,   

              a little watercolor kit,
                            a paintbrush with a sable tip.

To begin my study of the Bagram hollyhocks growing from the cracks in the ugly rubble of this place.  Transforming the ugly rubble in my heart, before it’s time to come home again. 

4/14/18

Afghanistan

Black on Red Olla

“My heart has never grown up as far as May, but a full life holds at least a hundred Aprils.”

            -from “A Cloud in Trousers” by Vladimir Mayakovsky

Hollyhocks

Blue Mosque