A Formula for Happiness

"A Formula for Happiness" - oil on cradled wood panel, 10 x 10 x .75.  Ready to hang.  Available here and at Artfinder.


“In my life I have found two things of priceless worth - learning and loving. Nothing else - not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake - can possible have the same lasting value. For when your life is over, if you can say 'I have learned' and 'I have loved,' you will also be able to say 'I have been happy.” 
― Arthur C. Clarke, Rama II

We've begun hoarding science fiction books.

Building stacks of books to be read.  Making sure the piles are plentiful and well-curated.  Consulting lists of "best of" and "recommended" until we've sifted the best of the best and created a bounty of other worlds waiting.

A Formula for Happiness

Somewhere in this odd couple of pandemic years, we began reading aloud each afternoon.  A bowl of popcorn, a couple of popcorn-hungry pooches and two humans transported by words to places far, far away. The places, the stories, the juicy descriptions and words - oh the words! Words to look up, savor and roll around the tongue.  Words to contemplate and share and deliciously place into sentences.  Words to forget as aging brains leak a portion of what we glean every day.

And this lovely ritual contains both learning and loving - Clarke's formula for happiness.

It also leaves two artists with brains stuffed full of adventure, creatures, planets, people, conundrums and endings.  It cannot help but spill over into the art.

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About the art - using oil paint palettes still wet from prior pieces and inverting them over a wood panel.  Sliding, scraping, blotting, moving the palette against the wood until the wet paint has transferred.  Finding shapes and worlds within the paint and jumping off from that place using only rubber wedge, soft cloth, fingers and chopsticks.