I awoke early with a nightmare, the end was walking down a road in a meteorite shower being hit with painful tiny rocks. I began to move faster in the mist and I noticed I was moving down a hill. Below me was a volcano erupting the meteorites (I have just remembered that a volcano was a potent cocktail in the Ingmar Bergman film I saw yesterday, interesting). I began to run faster and faster and the hill dipped deeper until I fell and awoke in terror. Fear dreams are either warnings or training for potential difficulty. I had the feeling that this was a stress warning so I will relax more.
So today I calmly worked on The Landscape Of Anna Q Nilsson. It's fine as an artwork and it is one of my most surreal and spontaneous paintings of recent times because many elements, not least the main underdrawing, were thought up on the fly. It does scream "give me blue!!!" though so I might use a blue frame to balance the hues.
Later though disaster restruck. I now know not to gild over gold. My other and far more important painting Perfection and Necrophilia lies ruined and it took 8 leaves of gold with it. I had no choice but to sand it down and I'll have to re-transfer the drawing and begin again. I might have to buy and prepare a new panel but with luck I can reuse this one.
So when calmness seems inevitable stress returns, or it should. I said should because I somehow don't feel bad about losing that most perfect of pictures. Perhaps because the underdrawing itself was transferred rather imperfectly and perhaps because my new mentality tells me that I've learned something about gilding I couldn't have any other way; and of course I've only lost 2 days work not more.
