It was a lovely April evening here, and the conditions were perfect. It was a Real Kinkade Moment. Most of you Electron readers are familiar with the very popular paintings of Thomas Kinkade, the "Painter of Light" whose saccharine renditions of cottages, gardens, and other architectural scenes made him millions of bucks in the '80s and '90s. He isn't as hot as he used to be, and he suffered from the economic collapse of the early 2000's. But he's still going strong, painting those fluffy scenes of misty landscapes and blooming flowers, which are too precious to be true, except once or twice a year, kind of like a stopped clock which has to be right at least twice a day.

The sky was an opalescent wash of sunset pink shading to deeper blue, with swirls of light pink and salmon clouds. The trees were covered with the first shoots of fresh yellow-green foliage. Flowering pink and white crabapples and magenta redbuds glimmered in the filtered light. The garden beds were full of bright tulips and daffodils, and just by the Burger King the dogwoods were about to break into bloom. Oh, wait, there isn't a Burger King in a Kinkade painting. Further down the cobbled street of charming townhomes, gaslights were just coming on. I drove my bright blue Hupmobile by garden beds colorful with creeping phlox and periwinkles, at the Sunoco station by the strip mall. Oops, there aren't any gas stations or strip malls in KinkadeWorld. That must have been painted by someone else. Finally I pulled in to the gravel driveway of my slate-roofed stone cottage, the yard filled with colorful rhododendrons and azaleas, where the windows gleamed bright gold, lit from within by the nuclear fusion reactor that I had recently installed….I think I'm losing track here.

I haven't had any time for physics recently, because I've been working on the artwork I mentioned in my last posting here, "2K." It's almost finished. Recent operations on it involved attaching two square watercolor paper panels, already painted, onto a textured black background using archival acrylic glue. In order for the whole assembly to lie flat, I have to press it down using blank illustration boards which are then weighted down with heavy books. Books about Italian Renaissance architecture are the heaviest books, so it is covered with these stone-like slabs of books on palazzi and mountain villages and carved garden sculptures and marble staircases. It will dry overnight and will be finished just before I go up to the Boston area where the recipient of the picture resides.

Not doing physics makes my Virtual Physicist nervous. (See my entry for 23 March 2005.) He is gently reminding me that I have not done any physics study in the last three or four days. My textbooks and work papers have been buried under watercolor stuff for those days. That is no excuse. Trajectories of projectiles aimed at an angle await me. How will I track those pop-flies, line drives, and hits off the wall while I'm watching baseball? Why, that outfielder knows his physics even if he never opened a physics textbook in his life! But I don't have the opportunity to hit or catch that ball myself. I may never do a real-life physics experiment, either. It's all virtual stuff, in the studio. I wonder if the big leaguers at the universities and laboratories get nervous if they do not do physics for a few days.

Posted at 3:42 am | link