Nugget

I decided something.  In my one and only post last year I mentioned that it was a craptastic year and I would tell you about it later, but I'm not going to.  Except for the worst part, because we are coming up on the anniversary of when my baby dog Rabbit died.  It was the worst two weeks of my life and then a very long slow road to acceptance of our new normal.  If I were to psychoanalyze myself I would say an overwhelming (and misplaced) sense of guilt plus debilitating sadness made me feel it wouldn't be appropriate or fair to do something that gave me joy, so I couldn't really think about painting.  Some people would have used art as a way to work thru the grief, and I tried a little bit with a new medium, but I just had to process some heavy shit internally.

It was months before I put acrylic paint on a canvas again, and when I did this is what happened:

It may not look like much, and I haven't even varnished it, but this piece means a lot to me.  There was no plan; a friend who knows I love Payne's Gray gave me a couple of tubes for my birthday so that was my starting point.  I troweled it on with a big palette knife, grabbed some additional colors, and even let some of the previously painted canvas show thru.  It is perfectly imperfect.

I miss Rabbit every day and I'm still not always able to talk about her without crying (like right now).  She was a weirdo little nugget and I am eternally grateful that I got to be her mom.

Cartoon Vibes

I want to show you real quick a few things I've painted so far this year.  One day I suddenly knew I needed to paint stripes.  Maybe it came to me in a dream - I can't remember.  The vision was very clear, which is unusual for me, and the painting turned out EXACTLY AS I WANTED!  For obvious reasons, it's called "Cartoon Vibes":

This one may stay in my personal collection forever, I love it that much.  And because the end result was so cool, I painted another:

Cartoon Vibes #2?  Weirdo color combo, but it's still good.  And here's #3:

Then I had a bit of a detour, but stayed in stripe city.  A while back I bought some Jo Sonja paint, because I'm always up for trying new brands and a friend said she loves it.  I got nine different colors (plus rose gold, but that's not relevant to this story).  On a whim I grabbed the nine colors and laid them out on my table in no particular order, just however they fell out of my hand.  That became my repeating pattern and we ended up with something that I SWEAR matches a sweater my sister had in high school.  So I named this one "100% Wool":

Lordy, lordy - there's something about stripes.  The cartoon canvases are all 18" x 24" and this one is 12" x 36".  Just to show that even wee ones can be striped, here's a 6" x 12":

If you follow me on Instagram you already know that I took advantage of a random nail in a random (and very tall) tree stump to get this photo, and I hilariously thought it looked like a member of the Queen's Guard with a striped mustache.  Can you see it?  Yes?  No?  Is it just me?  Should I name it "All The Queen's Men"?  That painting didn't quite turn out as expected, but it did somehow end up resembling a rugby shirt my sister also had in high school.  Eighties fashion, man - it's a thing all over again.

Onward and Upward

It's after 11:30 pm on New Year's Eve and this is my first post of 2019.  It's been a crap year and I will tell you about it later.  For now, I'm going to leave this here - one beautiful moment in time.

Bring it, 2020.  I'm ready.

Perfectly Paired

There are oodles of things to report, but I have to go next door and row several thousand meters.  I'm at 60,000 total but we're at the point where I can't skip any more days.  Last night I did NOT feel like doing anything but told myself to get 500 meters, just so I could say I did something.  I ended up with 6,000 meters.  It was a bunch of 500s, interspersed with a project for work, but I'll take it.

Until next time, here's a quickie picture of my new favorite painting, called Perfectly Paired:

I was mixing several shades of pink and orange paint - I think it was the background for a wee small commission - and had WAY too much.  I didn't want to waste it, so I quickly spray painted this cradled panel pink, then poured on all the leftovers.  Things went bad at this point and I ended up wasting the paint anyway because I scraped it off.  Happy accident - I loved the patterns that were left behind.  I added the pears and voila - new fave.  It looks particularly marvelous out in the snow!

Okay, enough procrastinating, the library gym is calling my name.  3-2-1-GO.

Accountability

One of my worst blog habits lately is a lack of follow-thru.  This is actually a bad life habit, but it has trickled into my blog quite a bit this year.  I can think of several things I've mentioned with the qualifier "more on that later."  And then there is no more.  You can chalk it all up to laziness.  In an effort to curb this rude behavior, I would like to report on the new paintings I said need to be added to my Etsy store.  So far I have renewed quite a few older listings that had expired, lowered the price on quite a few older listings, and uploaded about 17 new pieces.  I've got five more ready to upload this weekend and if the weather is decent tomorrow I will photograph several more.  Serious progress is being made!

I also have a new painting that I already photographed for Etsy, but I really love it so it's hanging in my living room.  I will list it tomorrow but I hope nobody buys it.

I named it Sweater Weather.  I had no idea what the end result was going to be when I started this piece - I just decided to paint some color blocks all using alizarin crimson as the base.  The tree was a complete surprise.  Going with the theory that if one is good two must be better, I'm doing another similar piece but the base color is one of Golden's new heavy body colors for 2018 - light orange.  This, unfortunately, was not a good choice.

I had to do quite a bit of fiddling to get something I liked.  And now I've probably ruined it with the tree - the jury is out until the final layer of paint goes on tomorrow.  But I think I wrecked it.

There's also a new addition to the Midnight in the Garden of Fruits and Veg series.  I haven't painted one of these in ages.

I named it Pear of Thanksgiving because I painted it Thanksgiving week.  I also painted the stair risers and two accent walls in my living room Thanksgiving week, but I'm not going to post photos.  The color is a HOT peachy pink and it's so bright it might break my camera.  I may come to regret this choice.  Questionable color choices appears to be a new theme for me.

Remember my heron painting?  His name became Silent Sentry and he flew off to his new home in Montana.  He became my friend Leslie's prize for finishing her latest manuscript and I'm thrilled he gets to live in such a creative atmosphere surrounded by lots of beautiful art.  And tonight I got a message thru Etsy from a lovely woman asking about the possibility of a small commission for her granddaughter.  If I can get it to look even remotely like it does in my head, we're good.

And speaking of none of that, in conclusion I'm posting this picture, which I also posted on Instagram today.

This is my library gym.  It's a tiny little space that perfectly fits my Concept 2 rower:  the wall you can see is full of book shelves and the other side is a gallery wall.  I have committed to the Concept 2 Holiday Challenge this year and, in the interest of keeping myself accountable, I'm telling the world about it.  The goal is to row 100,000 meters between November 22nd and December 24th.  I'm a little behind because on a few days I was either 1) a complete lazy ass or 2) busy shoveling snow, so my total right now is 18,500.  There is work to be done and, damn it, I'm going to do it.

Aretha

If the notes I just made on the back of an envelope are accurate, I have 30 paintings to add to my Etsy store.  Sugar balls, that will take ages.  Some of them have been finished for quite a while but needed hanging hardware, which I finally ordered last week.  And some of them are so fresh the varnish hasn't fully cured, like the last of my Aretha series.  There are seven total:

I love them all.  Aretha shall forever be relevant.

You win some, you lose some

First, this:

That's my girl.

Second, I have a story to tell you.  Once upon a time in the not too distant past, like a few weeks ago, I found a beautiful leaf in my yard and although it was almost identical to about ten thousand other leaves in my yard, something about this one struck me.

Those colors together are fabulous and I wanted to paint something with that exact combo.  I did a little custom mixing hoping for the best and, to be honest, I totally nailed it.

SO awesome.  It's called Autumn Vortex.  If you follow me on Instagram you've already seen this, but you don't know the end of the story.  The good part.  Well, the curious part.  The infuriating part.  When I paint something with my banding wheel the set up is on the floor inside a giant box that contains paint splatters.  I leave it there overnight during the initial drying stages because I know the surface is level.  The next morning I usually move the painting (still on the banding wheel) to my library gym where I take a picture right by the window in good light, then put it back inside the box.  After work, if the paint is mostly dry, I move it onto a shelf that's about four feet off the ground.  Air flow is better out of the box so the rest of the paint dries faster.  At some point during this part of the adventure - I think it was during day two while I was at work - a wee creature with mad acrobatic skills SOMEHOW managed to leave a trail of destruction across the face of the painting.  GAH!!!!!  There are no discernible footprints so maybe it was a flying creature.  Whoever it was, they are on my shit list.  I'm still going to varnish the painting and list it on Etsy; I should charge extra for the backstory.

In other news, I dropped off two paintings for the member show at the Helen Day Art Center in Stowe - my fave "Letting Go" that's in the September 30 post and "Under the Canopy."  Here's a terrible picture of that one:

I forgot to photograph it before taking it to work, where it was living pre-show because that's the only place I've got wall space for a 24" x 30" canvas.  Maybe it's bigger than that - I can't remember.

In additional other news, I FINALLY ordered hanging hardware so there will be a massive update to my Etsy store later this week.  The five moon flower paintings will be the first to be listed:

Also this little "Mountain Moon."  Everything with "moon" in the title, basically.

In my last other news for the day, here are the official family Autumn 2018 portraits.  I can't believe Rabbit sat still long enough for me to take a picture:

Just a couple of goobers wearing sweaters.