Lindy Whitton Studio

You know how my tagline is “life is art and art is life”? Well life this week has been a bit like one of those paintings that start out with a good idea, the sketch  goes well , I lay in the first washes and think to myself ” this is going well!” Of course that’s the killer – as soon as I let that little complacent thought escape from the deepest recesses of the confidence corner of my brain I just know that it’s all going down the gurgler!

Suddenly the colours don’t seem right, the tree trunk looks more like a lollipop stick and the river starts running uphill. So I splash on all the paint left on the palette in gay abandon just to cover up the mess and then start out again.

What I always want at this stage is to be able to go back , to lift the layers of paint and get back to that moment when the painting was so full of promise – and just stay there. I wouldn’t add another brushstroke. I would just enjoy the unpainted possibilities.

I’m so familiar with this process that these days I can pretty well spot the moment a painting is going to “turn”. Sometimes I can even ride through the moment , rework the surface and produce a better painting  than my initial concept. That’s a very rewarding experience.

So you might be forgiven for thinking that when I decided I was so fed up with ignoring the insistent little invite to upgrade to Windows 10 for free and started the download,that I might have recognised the path I was heading down. Even as my finger hovered over the Install button the IT Geek was warning me that it would just slow down my laptop further .

Did I pause for thought? Well  I did pause for just the teeniest moment but I’d already wasted all that download time, and I couldn’t face going back to more Windows nagging everytime I booted up so I closed my eyes , clicked and there it was – the “turning point”!

Up to this moment all had gone smoothly so I wasn’t too phased when the install finished and I saw that my display resolution was horribly wrong. Naturally there would be a way to fix it and hadn’t I given birth to the IT Geek for just such an occasion as this?  What I hadn’t factored into the equation was the antiquity of the laptop – the pharoahs of ancient Egypt probably had this very same model interred with them! By midnight the resolution was still horribly wrong, all my photos were elongated and unviewable. I went off to bed in a foul mood cursing Windows 10, the world in general and my self in particular.

The next morning I turned to Google and found I wasn’t alone- other’s had been here before and they had the answers. What a feeling of relief , I could still save this “painting”. I followed all the instructions but my stupid laptop didn’t seem to have read the same articles I had and the vital bits of information were missing. Off to work in a foul mood wailing – I just want Windows 7 back!

Of course the IT Geek saved the day and managed to reinstall Windows 7 a few days later- something to do with holding down F9?? And so I got my reset, I got to go back to the moment before it all started going wrong and now I’m just admiring the seamless simplicity of Windows 7 – no extra fiddly bits, no fripperies and finery , just the bare bones of a very pleasing operating system that lets me view my photos in their proper format.