Naming

All That Could Be
That's the title of the new painting. I've been trying to come up with something for the past couple of days and this is the first one that I liked. I wanted to avoid anything that featured the word 'red'. The exhibition is titled, The Red Show and the painitng is mostly red, so why make things more redundant?

Titles don't always come easy. If something doesn't hit me right away, I'll wait and let the work sit for a bit before attempting to name it. Honestly, most of the time, I'd not bother with titles, but I also hate using 'Untitled'. I do, here and there, but I try to avoid it when I can.

All That Could Be came to me today while at work. I was thinking about what I was listening to a lot while working on the painting. During one session last week, I was listening to some Nine Inch Nails. I hadn't done so in a while, but I'd recently purchased the latest book about the work of graphic designer David Carson, whose work I'm a fan of and who designed the cover for NIN's The Fragile. Nine Inch Nails has a live dvd titled, "And All That Could Have Been".

Love the title, but it was kind of the opposite of what I felt the painting was about. So, I inverted the meaning and wording to suit my needs. The suggestion of possibilities in All That Could Be appeals to me on a lot of levels in my life right now...

Ahead of schedule

I actually think the painitng is done. I'm pretty sure of it, at least. I did'nt think I'd get this far so fast with it. I like surprises that come out of nowhere like this. I'll have to look at it again tomorrow with fresh eyes, but I'm feeling pretty good about how it looks now.

I'm always a little skeptical when things work out sooner than I think they will with paintings. I just had this fear in the beginning that this piece was going to be tougher to bring to a resolution because of the size. Of course, there's still a week to go before I have to get it to the gallery, so who knows what may happen. Usually, once I feel a piece is done, that's it. I don't mess with it any more.

Busy stuff

Life has been crazy busy lately, both with good and bad. More good than bad, though. The bad is that I've been battling an eye infection-Uveitis. It's a swelling of the eye that anyone can get but is usually caused by some underlying health issue. I went today to have blood drawn so my doctors can figure out if there's anything else I should be looking after. Beyond that, I'm taking drops and the redness in my right eye is just about gone.

The rest of the busyness has to do with a large painting I'm working on for the next group show at Bridgette Mayer, The Red Show, opening on December 28th with reception on Friday, December 1st. The big deal about the painting is that it's 5' x 7', the largest canvas I've worked on in a long while. I thought I'd have a difficult time stretching it, but it came together much easier than I thought. I must be learning something because it's also one of the tightest canvas I've stretched. I thought it would have been sagging much, much more than it is at this point, as I've been working on it for a couiple of weeks now.

I actually considered having a stretcher fram made for this project, but with little time to work with, just about a month at the time, I purchased the stretchers and canvas and did it myself. I'm glad I did that because I discovered a way to stretch the canvas so that it was really tight. I still have to come up with a standard for rear supports but I think this piece is pretty solid.