Just A Quick Progress Photo

Here is a photo of Midnight Moogies as it stands at the moment.  I've still got quite a ways to go but I find I am stitching a bit more as I recover my strength.  I still can't shake the persistent cough but otherwise am returning to my usual state of health.  And as I do, I am spending more time stitching and less time just sitting  and watching DVDs or napping.

This fourth cat was a lot of fun to stitch in all of its red and orange glory.  But I am falling behind a bit on my daily quota of border stitching.  I'll have to put in a few days working on the outer grey border at the top of the design before treating myself to stitching the wild Rousseau-like flora at the bottom of the design.  I find this design to be very derivative: the Van Gogh like stars, the Rousseau like flowers and leaves ...  I am reminded of high school art appreciation classes.  That doesn't take away from my enjoyment of the piece.  Quite the contrary, while in college I used to make it a habit to drop by the Metropolitan to view Van Gogh's Starry Night at least once a month.  I would sit and gaze at it for a half an hour or so before moving on to my other favorites, like Max Ernst's The Geranium at MOMA or the gorgeous tapestries at The Cloisters.  Rousseau was another of my favorites.  Both the cats and the plants in this piece are strongly reminiscent of a Rousseau painting.  I used to buy postcard sized reproductions of his work and use them for bookmarks.  Indeed, I think it was memory's afterimages of favorite paintings that attracted me to this design in the first place.  Forty years after I graduated from college and left my native NYC, my tastes are still pretty much the same.  Paintings and statues and ballets and music that were my favorites in my college years remain so today.  Either my personal aesthetic developed early or I am a case of arrested development.  I prefer to believe the former theory is true.