<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;">January. Always a difficult month in the northern hemisphere. Down here in Spain it’s the coldest part of the year, but most days are sunny and cheerfulness abounds. What a difference the sun makes to one’s mood!<br />I’m working on pansies at the moment. Years ago, Hugh Brading from New Zealand came and taught a class at Rough Common for my SAA art group that I used to run. It was a wonderful class, and quite ruined me for future classes, as no-one ever lived up to Hugh’s style of delivery. He taught us methods for wet-in-wet which I use to this day, twenty years later. The other day, though, I was trying to remember how he taught us to draw a pansy, and I had to dredge back through my dusty memories to finally come up with it. And having achieved that, and established that pansies do indeed have five petals, I’m now exploring different ways of painting those sweet little pansy faces.<br />My YouTube channel is absolutely going nowhere. I don’t really mind, because I’m doing it mostly for my own record of what I do. Maybe one day, when I’m no longer able to paint, if I live that long, I’ll enjoy looking at the videos. Who knows. But it’s patently obvious that there is enormous corruption on YouTube. People who can’t paint for toffee are raking in thousands - tens of thousands - of viewers, and sharing their stupendous lack of skill with the world. I can’t quite see the point in it all, as it doesn’t lead to anything except stroking one’s ego to be able to say you have so many people in your ‘tribe.’ But the desire to create and to share one’s creations is unstoppable. Perhaps the act of creating, as it says in Eckhart Tolle’s book, a New Earth, is the whole point. Allowing the creative energy from the universe to flow through you. No need to sell, or even share ‘online’ your results. Just do it.<br /><div style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/bp_e4AyJvFQ/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bp_e4AyJvFQ?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div><div style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="clear: both; text-align: center;">I’ve done a lot of spinning over the last couple of months too, and was happy to see these three balls of yarn in my basket this morning, slightly surprised that I’d created them myself.</div><div style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://dianeantone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/83BF75B4-F5A2-47F1-9C56-88B7960BB5B4.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://dianeantone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/83BF75B4-F5A2-47F1-9C56-88B7960BB5B4-300x225.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /></div>