creative thinking

Had a late start to the day. Slept in a little because I was up last night catching up with online reading. Anyway, I got out of here after 2pm, rode over to the gallery to give Bridgette a check to hold a seat for me at a panel she's hosting next week. Called Rock Solid: Building Your Financial Present and Future as a Creative Professional, the event's panel runs the gamut from artist to gallery owner to a couple of financial advisors. Basically, just like the title says, it's designed to provide information and tips to artists on how to handle finances, invest, etc...

This is one of the things I like about working with Bridgette; she has a genuine interest in helping artists succeed financially in addition to helping them get their work out in the world. I don't know too many gallery owners willing to do as much as she is. She's really ambitious, supportive, honest, and down-to-earth. Most artists are lucky if they encounter two of those qualities in an artist-gallery owner relationship. While this is a good situation so far, I can't afford to sit on my ass, of course; there's paintings to be done, I have to keep up with finding opportunities to show outside the area, and I have to keep myself organized with slides, updating the resumé, and other paper-work. I'm, well, fair when it comes to organizaition, but there's a lot of room for improvement.

Time is marching on and I've been sleeping a bit. I had a conversation this afternoon with my former studio mates, Deb and Allen just before going into the studio. We were talking and soon the conversations came around to my show in September. It struck me in that moment that I had less than four months to get a bunch more work done. If I stay on track, I'll be done with the rest of the new paintings by the end of July and no later than the second week of August. That's the ideal, anyway, and we all know about the best laid plans.

Tomorrow I have to pick up a case of 48" stretchers from Utrecht and grab a few 60" ones next week. I need to get on the ball with buying some plywood to make panels to paint on and I need to make some time to do some drawings. I'd love to do some prints for the show, but I don't see that happening over the summer. I'll have enough to do with just the paintings.

Today, I spent some time working on some small paintings. One of the things that ran through my mind while painting was that I paint to learn. I mean, I paint for a variety of reasons. However, today's revelation was significant in that during the course of every painting session, I'm continually asking myself how this color will work with that one; how a line or area will look when painted with the round bristle brush as opposed to the flat brush; or noticing the differences in surfaces between paper and canvas and how I'll deal with that, etc...

There's little that's new about this since a large part of being an artist is about discovery. The difference, I think, is that at different points in an artist's life, these questions take on new meanings. In fact, I'd go so far as to say with every new work questioning the process begins anew.