The first time I looked at the painting today, I liked it a lot more than when I was painting on it last night. It looks a lot brighter, I was working more in midtones, with a looser, wetter brushwork in spontaneously mixed greys. It’s progressing well, but still a long way to go.
Lately I have a bit of pain in my right arm from tendonitis, and it’s painful to paint. I’ve been hauling big buckets of water from my sink to my garden, I had to start lifting the buckets with my left arm because it hurt too much. I wonder how much 5 gal of water weighs? I took some Alleve which is good for deep tendon pain, it should kick in soon and I’ll start painting.
I think I’ll go down to the art supplies store about 4PM today and get some new brushes. The ones I’m using are too small for this size of paper, and not enough variation in size. I have some huge brushes but they’re too big. Hmm.. Maybe I should just buy bigger paper, that would be a lot cheaper. I’d rather work larger. For that matter, I’d rather be working on more than one piece at once, so I could continue to paint on one while the other dried. I prepared a couple of boards like this so I could switch to another board. But I just don’t have enough space to do it. It reminds me of an old story I heard about Basquiat. He’d work on one painting at a time, focusing on that until he was finished. Then he hired an assistant, who saw him working. He told Basquiat that everyone works on multiple works at the same time, and his job as assistant was to prep canvases and move stuff around so he could do that. Suddenly Basquiat’s output exploded, and his works started referring to each other in a wonderful way.
7:10PM – I bought some new brushes, boy is it expensive to buy wide soft bristle brushes. I’ll work in the studio more tonight, so stay tuned. You’re invited to open the stream and just leave it running. I figure people actually want to see me paint, so I’ll leave a monitor running, and if anyone is connected, I’ll make an effort to paint. But the stream monitor only updates once a minute, so you’ll have to stay connected for over a minute before I could possibly notice it.