July 5, 2022 — The redwood painting is nearing completion! I suppose if everything totally flows I could finish it tomorrow (barring small refinements the next day). But more likely, I will ALMOST finish it tomorrow. It’s really looking good! I’m happy about how quickly it has gone up and how spot on my intuition has been regarding color choices. Or I suppose at this point, I could call it a skill. But it still feels intuitive. It’s something I’ve had from the get go. I’ve never used a color wheel, for instance. I just seem to know naturally what colors look good together (next to each other) and in the painting as a whole. And I seem to know how to mix them.
Speaking of palettes, a real game changer was buying a special refrigerator for my palettes. It was just luck that the width and depth of the little apartment fridge was exactly the same as the 20 x 24 stretched canvases I use as my palettes. And the grooves that hold the shelves are the exact size so the ½” deep canvases slide into the grooves. Small miracles like this are so remarkable.
Also lucky along these lines, is that my rolling cart that I’ve used for almost the whole 27 years of painting is so exact a fit for my canvas palettes that they actually grip it! The inside dimensions of the stretcher bars exceed the outside dimension of the cart top so precisely that literally lock into place. This is if I am using dual palettes which is pretty much always. The canvas palettes sit side by side, the 24-inch sides meeting in the middle of the cart ungripped, with their sides gripping the outer edge of cart. I’ll see if I have a picture of it.
But the palette fridge, oh my gosh, what a breakthrough business expense. By refrigerating my palettes when not in use, the classic oils (I don’t add anything to them), stay open through most of painting. Obviously, I’m remixing all the time as piles of mixed paint are used up. But when I walk in to work each day, I pull the palettes out of the fridge and those piles of paint are open open open! And the studio is waay less toxic as I don’t have all that classic oil paint sitting out all night degassing. Double breakthough. I used to about gag walking into the studio from the fumes after it was closed up all night.
Circling back to my compelling focus keyphrase, lol, the redwood painting is nearing completion. It makes me yearn to be in the actual redwoods again. I took a nice long nap in the woods that are painted here. Straight on the ground. Essential!
Doesn’t really do justice to what I’m trying to say because you can’t really see the cart. I’ll aim to swap out with a better photo.
