The little things...

Loving pumpkin seen on my way to the studio this morning

I’m a block away from the house, on my way to catch the bus up to the studio. A guy in a gray hoodie who looks to be late 40s-early 50s, walks past in the opposite direction and calls after me just after we passed each other:

“Hey, are you a painter?” (I was in my usual daily studio clothes of paint spattered pants, sneakers, and black hoodie now that it’s getting chillier)

“Yeah…”

“Ok, I didn’t think that you were a house painter” gesturing as if he was painting something. “Do you know James DuPree?”

I light up, “Oh, yeah, I know him!”

“So my son paints, too…”

At this point, my brain has started to tune him out and I’m trying to walk on because I’ll miss my bus if I don’t get moving. I feel bad, but every nerve in my body wants to start jogging a little to make up the couple of minutes I’ve lost. He says a couple of things that I don’t remember and we say our good byes. I missed the bus by a full block. I don’t regret missing the bus and wished I could’ve chatted a little longer, but it seems neither were meant to be.

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New drawings on paper, acrylic, 9 x 12 inches each

The day was full of taking care of what I call “little things” in the studio. I finished a new painting over the past couple of days and went about signing, dating and adding a title, after which I took off the blue tape I’d put around all four sides. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned this before in my blog, but here’s some advice from repeated past experience: If you use blue painter’s tape to keep the edges of your paintings on panels and canvas free from random marks, make sure to not leave it on for an inordinate amount of time, say, months at a time. The longer the tape stays on, the tougher it is to take it off. Thankfully, I leave about 1/8th of an inch of the sides untaped because of acrylic paint and mediums that accumulate along the edges. Once there’s enough of an “edge layer” of paint that partially covers the tape, the longer the tape stays on, the tougher it is to remove it.

There was a time when I didn’t care about the sides of my paintings having traces of their making, it’s just part of the process of the work. Then, there was a shift in my thinking because I started finding the sides distracting from the finished work. This probably had something to do with moving into making more geometric, architectonic paintings in the early 2000s. That’s when I started painting the sides white and using tape to keep the sides pristine while working. Even as my work changed after that period, I stuck with using the tape. Now, I feel myself swinging back in the other direction and not using tape at all. I let it happen with one or two of the smaller paintings in the Soft Poem series. I’m not quite sure about how I feel about it, yet. Time will tell.

Later in the day, I felt the urge to make some drawings exploring different configurations of forms and compositions that may be used as templates for upcoming paintings (see images above). They were fun to do and I kept the ‘making’ time short to insure there was no overthinking involved. There’s never a 1 to 1 translation of drawings directly to painting and some of this may not actually get used. They are a nice way to quickly get ideas out of my head so that I can make room for other things and to see how these ideas may work in real circumstances.

TM