mælstrøm

In a peculiar convergence of disparate currents, I find myself reading Byatt's The Biographer's Tale, dealing with a whirl of logistics, and painting Fenja and Menja. It is all very much aswirl. I say I am painting Fenja and Menja, but in fact what I am doing is adapting a black and white image of the jötunmeyjar found in one or another work on Norse mythology -- a woodcut, I think -- to canvas with the use of acrylic paints. The contours are fairly faithful to the original, with the result that my version reproduces the original artist's errors of proportion and anatomy. The foreshortening of the girls' arms is not entirely convincing. The breast of one seems unlikely firm, as if it were muscle like the generous rounds of her buttocks. But overall the composition is pleasing, and I am enjoying the action of pivoting the brush and guiding the paint around the corners of the figures---a very physical activity even though the motions themselves are small. So far, however, I have not broken into rhythmic worksong.