A good day

Well, today I Fedexed off the illustrations for After the Kill to the States and finished the portrait of a young friend.

There comes a point when you just have to put down the brush, wrap everything up in brown paper and string and dust off your hands.

Whether it's been a good day or not is up to posterity, as they say.

August 10

I think I could be justly accused of cherry-picking when it comes to religion.

Yesterday was the eleventh anniversary of my father's death. Every year at midnight on the eve of August 10, I light a candle, a Yahrzeit candle, that burns for 24 hours, so each time I pass through the room the next day I think of my father.

The flame is an appropriate metaphor. It radiates heat and light and is eventually extinguished, yet is not really alive. Like a memory.

Beach critter

Painting Day in Thegra

Yesterday I was asked to participate in the jury for the annual painting competition in Thegra. I was immediately drawn to this colourful painting. "This painter is visually impaired so we will need to give him a prize too," said the organizer. "But I think it's beautiful!" I replied.

I gave it top marks. It was also the selection of the other professional painter on the jury, but we were over-ruled by the members of the town council who preferred a carefully rendered sepia drawing of a stone building. Chacun à son goût.

Forgery or fortune?

There is a superb piece in the July 12 and 19th issue of The New Yorker, by David Grann, on authenticating works of art.

Is one painting acquired at a garage sale for five dollars a real Jackson Pollock worth millions, and another exquisitely rendered young girl painted by the master Leonardo himself? Peter Paul Biro believes they are, and he takes on the establishment in the form of people such as the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of art Thomas Hoving in what reads like a gripping gumshoe detective pot boiler.