Busy Day

That's my excuse for not getting yesterday's prompt written until this morning and not on the blog until this afternoon. Just barely afternoon but there it is. I worked to figure out how to make Ed make this Klimt painting or at least an approximation of it. I think Ed did okay.

Jenny, thanks for spending last night's meeting helping me organize my thoughts and move toward being ready to make my pitch to an agent in 2 weeks. I sure wish I knew that following the rules would guarantee an acceptance, but then that's been my argument with this whole submitting/rejection/acceptance system all along. Too subjective.

March 12--Gustav Klimt, Tree of Life, detail from Stocklet Frieze. Ed stood on the foredeck of the houseboat staring past the blank canvas on his easel into the thick darkness of the woods. His right hand holding his brush hung limp at his side as he watched the white blooms emerge on some medium-sized shrug in the darkest spot. Where earlier there had been just green leaves hanging limply, now in the growing dark pairs of white blossoms opened like spectral eyes. Ed changed the blank canvas for one with a rich gold background. He painted gilt swirls all over to represent the myriad vines and the swirl of the humidity pervading this low riverside forest. Then over the swirls he made a stylized tree with an odd narrow trunk curving up holding its thin branches out horizontally, triangular leaves in every shade of green in his palette, plus a few he made up. Finally, when everything else was dried, he placed pairs of perfectly round, starkly white blooms with soft pink centers that made them look more like breasts than eyes on the branches. He had just finished painting in a few butterflies when Vera brought out a tray with cheese, crackers, and a pair of rum drinks. "Interesting," she said, "you're painting a boob tree?" Ed frowned at his work, then rinsed his brushes and began cleaning up for the night. "No," he shook his head, "it's a tree of life." Vera smiled. "That's basically the same thing." Ed smiled back at her. "I suppose."

Leave it to a guy to paint a tree blooming with breasts. But then I did write about it so I'm partially to blame.
--Barbara