I've not mentioned it but my eyes are severely burning regularly for the past month or so. I suspect that it may have something to do with the fertilizers sprayed around here, since this is a still a fairly rural area. My eyes are a serious concern in my life, since my father has a dead eye and my grandmother was blind. I freak out about it just a bit.

I'm sorry Ben Stein, but your eye drops aren't doing much for me. Maybe if you used chemistry instead of faith.

In other news, I'm obsessing over acrylics these days. When I studied acrylics in college, nobody ever bothered to inform me that there are these wonderful things called mediums, that not only let you communicate with your loved ones that have passed on, but make your acrylic paint do all sorts of crazy stuff. I'm really fascinated by the acrylic tendency toward peeling off easily. Acrylic does some things oil simply cannot, and despite the old guard still preferring oil, you'd be hard pressed to find a mundane person who could tell the difference at sight. I like acrylics because they dry in half an hour and have some... unusual... properties.

First experiments in viscosity medium have been splendid. Adding viscosity medium to your acrylics not only lowers the cost of new paint (enormously) but allows some interesting effects. The early complaints about acrylics, int he 50s and 60s, were that acrylics don't have the strength and tactual body of oils. Nowadays, through science, that's hogwash.

Two experiments I've tried:

- Loading the acrylic up with viscosity medium allows you scrape it on thick, and if you wait a few minutes before it's totally dry, you can use rubber stamps in the paint, which is really interesting. I've never seen anything like it. You can then fill the stamp divots with transparent gloss gel medium mixed with pigment, which leads to a stupendously alien appearance that you simply cannot get with oil or watercolor.

- Put some viscosity medium'd acrylic of a dark color into a baker's frosting triangle, with a fine tip. Squirt it out like you would frosting. You can use this to build a framework like stainglass leading, or even a strange version of Cloisonné enamelling by filling in the viscosity medium frame work with gloss translucent medium filling. My old (worthless) metal professor Keith Lewis would be gog-magog'd if he could see it.

An idea I have percolating:

- What if you could paint on something that is stretched like canvas on a tee but is transparent? I had the mad science idea of putting a base coat of transparent self-leveling medium and pigment on top of a layer of florist's mesh, on top of a piece of glass. When it dries, peel the wire off the glass, taking the acrylic with it. Stretch it as you would canvas, and then paint/glaze on top.

OR!!!

Not even do stretching. Lay a waffled framework of florist's wire, taking care to be as stylistic or messy as you like, and then do the same.

I really am obsessed with the 3-dimensional qualities of acrylic. I think it's so fucking cool.