In painting class tonight our teacher, Fred, was talking about how expensive oil paints are now. He was speculating that turpentine is now a “hazardous material” and it costs extra to transport things like that. He was saying you can’t even buy commercial oil paint anymore. It’s illegal in California and “as California goes, so goes the nation.” It’s all acrylic or water based enamel now. A tube of paint is thirty bucks or so.
I got the conversation going because I said I was going back to oils after this batch of paintings. I’ve been using kids’ tempera paint and I’m getting tired of how it acts when I try to rework an area. You kind of reactivate what’s below and it gets messy.
Whenever Peggi’s sister was in town visiting her mom she would ask us what freeway she takes to get from wherever to wherever. I’m the wrong one to ask because I’ve lived here so long I just follow my nose and I can’t keep the 490, 390, 590 thing straight. I remember Route 47 doing pretty much the same thing. Anyway, the point is there are no “freeways” in New York. California has freeways. We have expressways and a thruway. So what were they thinking when when they put up this new sign on 590 North where that highway peters out and leads into the four traffic circles?
I don’t really think of MX-80 Sound as a California band but they’ve been there for about thirty years, long enough for vocalist, Rich Stim, to reinvent himself as video king, “MXRICH”. I love his his newest, done for an Angel Corpus Christi instrumental track.
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