Playing the Piano - Part 10 - Everyone's a Critic

My worse critic is our dog bubbles. When I first started playing he’d start shaking and sat beside the front door, looking like any minute he was going to soil himself. This week, after playing since May… a breakthrough! He fell asleep while I was practicing. He’s an old guy now (10), and we rescued him from the spca when he was just a pup. He’s never snapped and is always happy (he's smiling in the photo).

I can play three or four songs and I am currently going through a piano instruction book “Learn to Play the Piano in 10 Easy Lessons” (sure you can). I guess the book wouldn’t sell if it was titled “You Might Learn to Play Piano with these 10 Complex Lessons and a lot of Practice Every Day for a Year!” I looked over some of my posts and realized how far I’ve come in the last month. I also realized my sheet music height needs to be lower… so I’m going to figure out some sort of attachment for my piano stand.

Fabian’s Play list (order of skill)

• Both Sides Now
• Red Red Wine
• Jingle Bells
• Auld Lange Sine
• Night they Drove Old Dixie Down
• Tiny Dancer (the intro)

Artist - Part 7 - "I'm painting, I'm painting again" ~ David Byrne

Well, I did finish my last painting two weeks ago… It seems to look best in daylight, it seems most of my paintings look best in natural light since working in Flemish colouring. I took photos of my last seven paintings with my sony camera, I need a digital SLR camera to achieve what I want, along with some fancy lighting. The sony camera is 90% effective so it’s hard to justify the cost of upgrading.

The unfinished photo is fuzzy because it was taken in my dark studio on a whim. I can tell it is a transitional piece because there aren’t any visual cues that cause me to ask “how in the hell did I do tha?!” It shows a confident approach but still lacks the confidence of future pieces I know I can produce. I consider it a very successful piece and believe it can stand the true test of time. (I won’t cringe when I see it in years to come)

This concludes my base body of work… 7 paintings done in the past year, 3 -7 other paintings done before this and between 5 - 10 drawings.

Over the next year I will continue to oil paint more directly, draw (as much as I can), and start developing some new water colour moves I’ve been learning.