The other day, Suzanne and her mother and I spent the afternoon at the Nelson-Adkins Museum.  At one point, I was looking at the big Franz Kline the NA has in its new Bloch wing and my mother-in-law asked me what I saw in the painting.  Now, these days, mostly what I look at is technique.  How did the artist create the image?  How did she apply the paint?  What sort of brush-strokes did he use?  Did she change her mind about parts of the canvas?

I pointed out to my mother-in-law a couple of area of the Kline that looked like they had been painted over, white-over-black, and I showed her which brush stroked looked like they had been applied first and which one were done later.  I don’t know if Kline considered some of the over-painted areas as mistakes or simply a change in direction, but I know that occasionally, I make a mistake in my art.  For example, I made a big one right off the bat in siting my Trellises.

My plan for locating the three trellises was to use a grid of my front yard divided into 28 5′ x 5′ squares.  On paper, it looked correct, but when I developed the grid on the ground, I used 10′ x 10′ squares instead of 5′ x 5′ squares.  So, my first trellis was ten feet off.  I realized what I had done when I started to site the second trellis, but I made the decision to leave the first one in the wrong spot; after all, I am nothing if not flexible with this project and it will make the flower/bulb/shrub beds in that area a bit more serendipitous.