Daily Painting

I’m writing this post on a Monday instead of a Friday, which means week 6 of daily painting goes under the category

Life Happens

Thursday night Dave decided to list our old home on Zillow (I was sleeping).

He’s a night owl. I’m a morning person that can’t function after ten.

The plan was always to sell, but in my mind we weren’t ready. We’ve got the whole ” a contractor and designer’s house is never finished” deal going on.

On Friday, when I came in from my morning run, I had six missed calls from him. I called back, and he frantically asked if I could get the house clean (it’s been sitting for four months). He was showing the house that afternoon.

He showed it one more time and on Saturday morning we had a full-price offer. He showed it twice more that day.

Needless to say, that put a kink in my painting schedule.

The story of our old home is coming…I need to give it the space it deserves. There’s a lot of emotion that comes with selling a house, and especially this one.

I’m actually feeling good about what DID get accomplished during the chaos.

I painted four times during weeks six. 3 out of the 4 were decent. Two will go to my online shops. 1 has already sold.

On Friday I decided to paint on a larger canvas (20×24) to give myself a break from the smalls. A few hours turned into five, and at the end of the day, I ended up with something completely different than intended.

The artist on her journey opens the pipeline to the unconscious, the Muse, the superconscious.

With this, every prior assumption flies out the window–who our parents told us we were, that our teachers imagined we’d become, even what we ourselves believe we are or will turn out to be.

The Muse tells us who we really are and what our subject really is.

No wonder these feel like surprises. They are voices that we never knew we had, rooms and wings in our house that we never knew existed.

Steven Pressfield, The Artist’s Journey

A friend on Instagram said that “it looks like the beauty and chaos of womanhood.”

Such a good possibility. You can decide for yourself what it means.

In the meantime, I’m taking Andy Warhol’s advice:

Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it is good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.

This week my studio painting will be put on hold while I jet out of the negative temps for sunny Las Vegas and the great KBIS convention. To those who don’t know what that means, basically I’ll be looking at lots of new products put out for your kitchens and bathrooms. While scouting product I am going to take a sketch book and my camera. I’ll be gathering painting ideas as well. I think it will be a blast to take a trip and look at it through this lens.

And who know? When someone asks what I do, maybe I’ll be brave enough to say, “I’m an artist.”