. . . am absent-minded

Yesterday I headed over to the UPS store to ship a package. I had been painting immediately before I left. . . no make-up on, hair barely combed, looking like a big mess, but not really caring because it was a quick trip and then back to painting. Looked in the rearview mirror. . . gasp. My eyes were ringed with white. Both of them. Hilarious. Don't ask how they got that way. Something to do with gesso on my hands and itchy eyes. And sadly, the effect was not rejuvenating. It did absolutely nothing for my dark circles and bags.

. . . waited until daylight

to take this picture today. I thought I could just turn off the overhead lights in the family room and end up with no glare. Wrong. I ended up with a really dark picture that couldn't be fixed by editing. Then I taped the painting up in the dining room, with the dark brown walls. But the sun was shining in from the east, glaring onto the painting. So I ended up laying it on the floor by the front door. As long as the painting is small enough to fit in the frame while I'm standing over it, I think I have found the right place. Bigger paintings will just have to wait until it's nice enough to go outside and take pictures.


I spent my art time yesterday trying to repair cracks in a painting. I suspect that the cracks resulted when I used cheap, nonartist-grade materials as the texture base (i.e., spackling compound, anything from the hardware store.) Now I use Liquitex Extra Heavy Gesso for the texture base. Much better.


The other issue I'm having is that the framers are telling me that when they try to stretch some of the canvases I have painted, the paintings appear to be askew on the canvas and they end up with bits of unpainted canvas on some edges. This is disheartening to me, because I am soooo very careful to cut the canvas straight off the roll. I use a big metal yardstick that has a 90 degree angle on it, and I start with the selvedge edge of the canvas, which should be straight, right? My first thought was that the canvas was woven at a slant (which I used to encounter frequently when I sewed, especially on cheaper fabric.) It used to be you could tear a piece of fabric and make it square up. I haven't been able to do that with any canvas for a while. But I consulted with my friend at the art supply store and he told me it had more to do with the canvas stretching one way and not the other and also with using premade stretcher bars as opposed to making them from scratch. He told me the canvas I was using was fine. The solution is just to overpaint my canvases. So suppose I quit using painters tape for making a nice clean margin around my paintings, and just paint clear to the edge of the canvas? Would that work?


These problems make me realize how little I know about the nuts and bolts of painting. I suppose it's all part of my education, right? One learns by doing, and screwing up. Some experiments just won't work.

. . . copied a collage

After using up most of a roll of canvas, I had one odd-sized piece left. I cut it into two smaller equal-sized pieces and decided to paint something with eye-popping color. I used one of the little collages I did during January as inspiration. I took five pictures of this painting this morning. Every one of them had that hazy whitish area in the upper left corner. Apparently it's just the glare from the overhead lights in the family room. Just try to imagine it isn't there. And try to imagine that the black looking rectangle in the middle of the right side is deep purple, because it is. I wonder why I bother to take pictures. I could just tell you about it and you could try to imagine how it really looks. There's a companion piece to this one that I'll show tomorrow. Try to imagine it until then.

. . .stamped circles, grids

on this small piece of experimental art on foamcore. I am likely to use anything I can put my hands on as a circle stamp, from pencil erasers, paint lids, and makeup bottles to these little fake foam marshmallows that I found at a hobby store. The spiral is a stamp I carved myself and of which I am inordinately proud since carving stamps is not in my set of skills. And the plastic cross-stitch grid is perfect to use as texture, as is some screening material I found at the hardware store. This is actually one experiment that doesn't have too many layers on it. I think I'll just keep it the way it is now. I had better hide it or I'll probably keep playing with it until it's beyond artistic, all the way to a jumbled up mess.

. . . get a kick

out of these little accidental pieces of art made on foamcore with the leftover paint and texture material on my painting tools. This one is very crunchy; I would almost have to include a depth measurement along with the height and width (which is about 5 x 6".) I didn't really pay much attention to this one until I put the black mat on top of it and then it seemed to take on an exaggerated importance. Pay no attention to the white spots on the mat; my scanner bed needs to be cleaned from something I scanned that hadn't completely dried.


The trick for me on these experiments is to know when to stop. But actually, I can't screw them up, because they are total serendipity. And the more layers to them, the more interesting they become. I need to remember this when I'm making the "official" art. . . everything I do in the studio is a lesson, an experiment, gaining knowledge by doing something, anything. . . living up to the "what if I" tried this or did that.

. . . were in style

According to this morning's style section of the newspaper, gray is the new beige, not only in clothing but in home decor. I guess that means my sweatshirts are the latest fashion, as is this painting which went out the door a week or so ago. See those five squares? Think they are black? Nope, they are deep deep purple, stamped on the canvas with the end of a small block of wood. And they correspond to another stripe of deep purple on the left side of this painting, that I managed to cut off when I took this picture. Lots of texture, markings, and the requisite pop of red. Still working on those neutrals.

. . . decorated my walls

Mary Ann at Blue Sky Dreaming wants to know what art is on our walls. Leslie at Textures Shapes Color says we are rich in art, if nothing else. And I needed something on my walls for when the realtor showed up to analyze my house.


This is just the beginning of a painting. It is probably in its third incarnation. Once I painted over it. Then that paint flaked off, so I sanded it all back down to the bottom layer. Then occasionally I would put some paint on it as it sat in the studio, taking up space. It's the only painting I still have that is already stretched and framed. And since it is destined to stay with me, I haven't done much to it, preferring rather to spend my art time making things that might sell. Kind of like the shoemaker's children go barefooted, or another irony like that.


I'm pretty sure that at some point this painting will be radically different than it is right now. There is only one layer of each color on this canvas. . . who knows how many more layers it will end up with. In the mean time, against the dark brown of the dining room walls, it's eye-catching if nothing else. But I wouldn't want anyone to get up close and personal with it.