We've had three weeks now where the studio hits 32° by noon. I can't open the skylight without letting in the construction dust from the building next door, so I've been working with the door propped and a fan that just moves the hot air around. The cold wax medium behaves completely differently. It's soft before you even put it on the palette. The layers that should take three days to set are still tacky after a week. I had a piece I was building up, white over warm grey, and I went to scrape back and the whole top layer came off like butter. Ruined it. Or maybe it's a different painting now, I don't know yet. I've been mixing the wax a little stiffer to compensate but then it drags on the knife and I lose the gesture I want. There's no solution, really. You just adapt and the work becomes what the weather lets it be. What I actually mean is: I hate summer in the studio but I also kind of need it, because the winter work comes out too controlled and I don't realise that until July shows me what I was missing.
Got the go-ahead on a commission for a large landscape piece. It's a local scene, a rolling hill farm at sunset. I'm so excited but also a little nervous, it's bigger than anything I've done before. I've stretched a 30x40 canvas and now just have to actually put brush to it. Wish me luck! I'll need all the focus I can get with the kids home for the summer too. Maybe I'll hide out in the garage studio after bedtime.
it's thirty degrees in my studio and the pastels are soft and greasy in a way that makes everything feel like I'm drawing with butter. I keep stopping to wipe my hands and the paper is taking the pigment differently, more smudgy, less controlled. I'm trying to do a portrait and the nose keeps turning into a muddy streak. I know I should just accept it as part of summer drawing but I'm fighting it instead, pressing harder, making it worse. does anyone else just... refuse to adapt for like a week before giving in? or is that just me being stubborn
six months of emails. "we love the direction." "let's revisit after the summer show." meanwhile my inbox stayed quiet and my work sat in my studio getting dusty. then last week they post the lineup for the fall exhibition. same slot they'd been hinting at for me. filled with someone whose whole thing is neon resin pours that all look like the same puddle. i'm not even mad at the other artist. i'm mad at myself for treating "maybe" like a yes for half a year. should've kept pushing my own thing instead of holding my breath for them. everyone says don't wait for permission. i believed it until an actual door cracked open and i stood there politely waiting for it to open the rest of the way. that's the part that stings. anyway. the market crowd keeps buying, so it's not like the work's dead. just wondering how many "maybes" i let keep me small.
alright here's one that's been rattling round my head. I did a group show maybe three years back, decent gallery, nice space, did the whole song and dance. Sold three prints. Got my cut six months later after chasing it twice. Grand, that's the game, I know. but the same summer I did a one-night thing in a mate's pub in Salthill. Hung stuff on the wall with picture wire and blu-tack. Sold five prints off a stack on the bar and took cash in a jar. Made four times what the gallery paid me and had a feed of pints out of it. I'm not knocking galleries, I've had great ones. But I'm wondering, have ye ever done something scrappy and unpolished that outsold the proper exhibition? Like a studio open day, a market stall, a pop-up in someone's living room. What worked? What felt mad but actually paid?
I haven’t painted in a while, I have lots of ideas in my head but with summers here and lots of personal n professional commitments I am not able to find time to pick my brushes and spend those creative hours in my studio. I am not sure if this is going to impact my creative momentum or give me a new energy n inspiration when I start back in my studio? What do you think?
I had this portrait I did last summer, a woman with her hair caught in wind, all warm ochres and pale blue. I was so proud of it at first, then after a few months I started seeing everything wrong with it. The jaw was off. The pastel dust had settled into the paper grain in a way I didn't like. I kept it in my studio, didn't even photograph it properly for Instagram. I mentioned it in passing to someone at a small market stall I was sharing last month, just complained actually, that I had this piece taking up space and nobody wanted it and maybe it was just a failed experiment. She asked to see it. I pulled it out reluctantly. She bought it on the spot. Not because I pitched it well. Because I stopped trying to make it sound like something it wasn't. I've been thinking about that a lot. How much energy I spend polishing the story around my work, making it sound impressive, desirable, worth someone's time. And the one time I just said "this thing exists and I'm not sure it's even good" it worked better than any of my careful descriptions ever did. Maybe the selling is in the honesty, not the framing. I don't know. I'm still figuring it out.
There's a print I did as a demo at a market two summers back, a little heron standing in a puddle, and I pulled it while a crowd of people stood watching me carve. Hands sweating, chatting away while I was praying I wouldn't slice clean through the lino and ruin it in front of the whole town. I gave the first few pulls away to people who stood there the whole time, the patient ones. Anyway. This week I framed one of the good pulls and it's on the wall in the studio now, and I keep glancing at it and feeling grand about it for the first time. It's not the best print I've ever made, not close. But it's the one where I stopped being terrified of doing it badly in public, and that turned out to be a bigger thing than the print itself. Framed it in a bit of oak scrap I found in the shed, which is very on brand for me. The matting is wonky. I don't care. Anyone else got a piece that matters for the doing of it, not the look of it?
I've been selling small landscape pieces at the local fair circuit for about three years now at $80 a pop. People seem happy to pay it, I get regulars who come back every summer, and I told myself raising it would scare people off. This week I actually did the math for the first time. A 9x12 landscape uses maybe $6 of paint, but I burn through way more than I sell because I'm still learning and repaint constantly. Then the canvas, the frame, the booth fee split, gas to the fair. The last piece I sold, after everything, I made about $11 an hour. And that's the GOOD one, not the ones sitting in my studio because the sky came out wrong. Worst part is my friends think $80 is a splurge already. Going to $95 feels like a big ask in my head. I know it's not, but here we are. Anyone else frozen at a price you set years ago because raising it feels like you're being greedy?
