I’m kind of excited.  My mom recently inherited a family farmhouse in North Carolina and the random contents of that house.  One of those objects is an enormous photo of me on the beach around age 4.  I was all smiles and cuteness then, but who wants a giant picture of themselves hanging on anyone’s wall?  It might be weird to greet house guests with a larger than life image of me in a purple swimsuit.  That’s not why I’m excited.

I’m excited because my mom wants to replace that photo with one of my watercolors (yet to be painted, since I usually don’t paint anything on the right scale for that frame).  She’s my mom, so she’s required to like my paintings even if no one else does, but that doesn’t make the project any less fun.

Painting is one of those things that I forget to do unless I have a very specific goal in mind.  For a while, that goal was assignment-related.  Then it became a matter of filling empty wall space cheaply.  Since both of those reasons are gone now, I’ve basically stopped doing anything watercolor-related.  Thank goodness for parents who encourage silly dreams.

At this point, I’m thinking about painting the house and/or some of the red tobacco barns behind the house.  Plenty of good material there.  Don’t expect anything like this:

That’s not really how I roll.  Winslow Homer might have an edge over me in the skill department.  Just a little edge.

If anything good comes from this experiment, I’ll update accordingly.  If I end up with something that looks more like ink blotches than Homer’s painting above, I’ll keep it to myself.  Or I could put the blotches on the blog and see what you guys think they mean about me on a deep, psychological level.  We’ll see.