Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Stretching Canvas Week! ...or the "I need a much bigger apartment" blog


I am stretching 8 canvases this week, and hopefully will get well into oil priming them by Thanksgiving. I do them in batches, because it's hard to switch from stretching to painting in the same day. Mostly for space reasons. Depending on what I am doing, I usually have to reorganize my apartment to accommodate everything. The picture above is my living room. I don't paint in this room. It's usually used as a living room/office/library/dining room. But because it has more "open space" I use it for stretching canvas as well. My apartment has 2 other rooms. The kitchen, and the bedroom/laundry room/studio. It's pretty tight. I can turn around but that's about it. I do need to spend a weekend purging a bunch of stuff to make more space, but I've been meaning to do that since January and it's likely it will be a while before it happens. Once I get this latest round of canvases stretched, the tiny space will really start hitting me. 80% of my walls are already covered by existing art. And so once I start working on these canvases I'm going to run out of wall space real quick (I like to keep my paintings out in the open on walls while I work on them-- I think half of painting is just looking at the paintings as they progress....) So I am going to have to solve my space problem, and soon. Over the next months I will either A) need to sell paintings, B) need to lend paintings, C) need to get a raise so I can rent a storage space for paintings. I'm really really pulling for option A, but that's not going so well-- at least not for the big ones. (I guess technically I've sold 8 or 9 paintings this year, but they were super tiny.) But for now I'm just going to keep on stretching and painting. I'm aiming to do a couple more paintings by the end of the year, so I can go out with a bang. Then more at the start of the year... to start the year with a bang. Hopefully I'll have more shows coming up, that I'm working on. I am going to do a 1 day show on December 13 with some small works, so I'll be working on those for the next week or so while I get my big big canvases primed and ready for action.

2 comments:

Pocket-Sized Cinematographer said...

I love this picture! You look like Action Woman, ready to Save the World Via the Medium of Oil Painting. What's on the TV screen behind you?

Bekka said...

It's either Le Double Vie de Veronique or Trois Coleurs: Bleu. I forget what exactly was playing at that moment. I watched them both today.