It’s been two weeks since I last blogged. The Fall Art Tour was a beautiful weekend and a success. In the meantime I’ve expe- rienced a resurgence of an inflam- matory arthritis I had twenty years ago. My left hand has been crippled, though fortunately I paint with my right hand, but besides working more at Lands’ End, I’ve had to see a doctor and a rheumatologist, which has eaten up some of my studio time. I did finish this still-life of a German Chocolate Cake from the Rolling Pin Bakery in Madison. The plate and the embroidered table cloth were borrowed from my beloved friend, Josephine, who brought out her treasures and said I could borrow whatever I wanted.

With German Chocolate Cake, I should be blogging a poem by Goethe or Rilke, but this poem by Yeats seemed pertinent at the culmination of a presidential campaign:

They must to keep their certainty accuse
All that are different of base intent;
Pull down established honour; hawk for news
Whatever their loose fantasy invent
and murmur it with bated breath, as though
The abounding gutter had been Helicon
Or calumny a song. How can they know
Truth flourishes where the student’s lamp has shone,
And there alone, that have no solitude?
So the crowd come they care not what may come.
They have loud music, hope every day renewed
and heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.

The Leaders of the Crowd by William Butler, Yeats 1921

German Chocolate Cake, Oil on Canvas, 8×10, $325.00 USD