Ten Minutes

Ten Minutes Aug 1 2019

I’m at it again. Setting a timer for a small slice of personal time, getting into a routine of self care and self soothing and settling all the crazy thoughts in my head.

The biggest thought right now?

I HAVE TO PAINT.

Badly. I can feel a throbbing, painful urging in my chest, looking at colors and thinking about textures and patterns, different strokes and lines and shapes and designs. I want to make another painting for the Waypoint Collections in black and white, delicate, like smoke and fine lines of graphite, two sides of the same page, visible in the light. I want to reach, deep, into handfuls of paint and draw them thin across the surface of a canvas with my bare hands. I want ink on my skin. Oh, so badly, do I want ink on my skin.

There are a few things, here and there, that I do to help scratch that itch and make my artistic brain feel satiated for a time. But mostly, that joy comes from painting, and i have not painted in a long time.

Have I told you about the spiders?

We have a whole host of them. Fat, spindly things, that I find on our stairs or against the bathroom floorboard or nest to the door to the garage - my studio. Some of them are scary looking, with long pointy legs and fat shiny bellies, and others are aggressive, big as tomatoes and fast and direct as the rush you, Braveheart style. FREEEEEEDOMMMMMM!

I don’t let them live if I find them inside. They can live in the flowers all they like, but that’s my line in the sand. I HAVE to do something about it. In fact, I should start researching exterminators now. I am hoping that by winter, I will have been able to fully rehabilitate the garage and turn it into the beautiful studio that I want it to be… but realistically, that just may not happen. I need time to do that, and time is the most scarce of all commodities at this moment. Perhaps after I finish these paintings, this next project, I can let myself work on the studio itself.

(What will be step one for that? An exterminator? A garage door guy?)

Midnight idea for a painting

March 5, 2019

Well it’s not even midnight, it’s 3 am. 3:09 to be exact. We’re just finishing a feeding but I was scrolling through Instagram and saw some tasty roses of alcohol ink on yupo, and thought that for the next two scarf designs it’d be lovely to layer some sheets (rivers?) of yupo on canvas and then apply ink on them, under resin/pouring medium as well. With an absorbent ground on the canvas it’s provide a great opportunity for two diverse types of outcomes, which would be consistent with the themes for those pieces. Just a thought, go back to bed. ❤️

Molly Moser.

For Molly’s painting, I’ve chosen a 12” x 15” mounted wood panel. After gessoing the surface, I started  preparing the background layers with a mixture of hard edged abstract elements and powdered graphite; contrasting the structured portions of Molly’s life with the messy, difficult-to-control portions (as well as giving a nod to her teaching profession). I pulled the graphite into some meandering tendrils to begin to add depth to the first few layers and tie the geometric shapes into more organic pieces. A fine misting of water over the surface of the entire work blends the graphite and the acrylic paint on the hard edged shapes. I want to continue to build layers in black and white, inspired by much of the decor in Molly’s home, but add in highlights of color in the final stages, hidden in among the layers.

This morning sun is getting warmer.

At least, it looks warmer. I know it isn’t really that warm out yet, I just let the dogs outside and there a frigid wind blowing through our little cove in the side of the hill where our house is. My heart can’t decide what it wants; we’re stuck between winter and spring and part of me is pining for deep snow and cozy fires and the other part of me wants budding wildflowers and the return of the bees.

Certainly, the long light and warmer days of spring-into-summer will be a welcome addition to our workshop; currently the concrete floors sap the warmth from the room and makes it difficult to work there for long periods of time. But there are other things to be done, warmer things, tasks that take me inside and sometimes even gratefully under a blanket for the evening, and when it’s so cold and windy outside I don’t mind that at all.

Im learning a new apocalypse-skill, how to tie sutures, and it’s surprisingly challenging and fun. Hopefully I never have to use it, but the practice of it is essentially like sitting around darning socks. (Not that I’ve ever darned a sock, either, mind you.)

Here are a few of the sunniest and warmest pics from my camera roll to represent my yearning for summer.

These objects that will never be

I found this chunk of dried pouring medium and ink at the bottom of a takeout container. I’d used it for a pour, months ago, and left it to dry, because once it’s cured I can just pop it right out and the container is clean again. Easy enough. But then there’s the matter of my heart. MY HEART. My heart that breaks for this beautiful thing that’ll never be a painting or even a sculpture or anything useful at all. Just a chunk of dried paint. Just the byproduct of another piece of art. But still an object than will never be.

at least we got these lovely photos together.

what should I do with these?!

The story of Deep Sea Blues and the mountains within us.

I’m obsessed with Peruvian rugs.

Photo credit for all of these goes to  https://maximolaura.com

i never knew this was something I needed in my life until now. I just love these!  

Resin experiments

I am SO excited about the depth and color coming from this resin top coat! Can’t wait to do more 😊

Studio day: revisiting old work and organizing all the things!

I spent yesterday and today (in between cello practice) organizing my paints and going through all my colors to weed out empties and dry tubes. By the way, if you don’t already own a paint wringer... invest in one! They will save you so much time, money, and frustration. (Here’s the one I use.... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MT2A6WP/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_radNAbSSA6ETB)

I’ve also set up my new profile on Vero and have been having fun exploring the community there... if you’ve migrated too, look me up! I love that all the posts are categorized by type. It’ll be a great way to keep track of all the books I read this year 🤓🙃

I hope you all are having a lovely Sunday. Go out and make something!  

Studio Day: Dark eddies and swift tides