Art night.

Tuesday night is my art night. I pack up my easel and canvas, grab my paints and brushes and head out to a nearby secondary school where I sit and chat and laugh and paint and get tips on how to use acrylics. In this case (like last year) this particular course was a gift from M. for my birthday. I like experiencing learning and is some ways it is a bit of an addiction. I pick up new hobbies quite frequently, get passably proficient then move on... its probably not a great thing to admit but I can do a lot of things only a little well. Occasionally some craft or art will meet all my needs for creativity and functionality and then I feel the need to do it all the time (knitting... my fingers itch for needles when idle). 

 

I paint in watercolour intermittently- usually to make gift pictures for family and friends ( a painting for M. of London South Bank can be seen on the wall here) and I love colour pencil painting (here) but I have been actively terrified of acrylics and oils. The solidity of the paint as you put on the canvas gives me a quaking of anxiety, feeling that whatever I'm seeing is going to look like a toddler sploshed it on. M. ever the pragmatist thought I really aught to learn to use acrylics so I can paint his mum a birthday present that is not in watercolour (they already have a watercolour of mine on the wall from a birthday gift in 2011for his dad).

The point of this post is not however the painting, or the picture, but the BOX. Ohhhhh yes the scrumptious little wooden beauty that houses my paints and brushes.
Also a gift from M. procured at our local car-boot sale for an astonishingly tiny price. Though I didn't know it was for me I was there and listened in awe when the vendor quoted such a ridiculously low price M. didn't have the heart to haggle with the poor man. It is old- no telling how old however- and it has a gorgeous patina of age which fortunately didn't wipe away entirely while M. was cleaning it up.
 My favorite bit?

The name and address of a previous owner written in an old fashioned scrawling hand on a stained, battered, peeling piece of paper stuck to the inside lid.

 

x Jo