July

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It's funny that certain things come up in your life on their anniversary dates.

@badpatient just tweeted a video of the Dresden Dolls doing a cover of PJ Harvey's Rid of Me. If you don't know PJ (I should find you, shake you soundly and give you a mix CD) what you don't know is that Rid of Me is the single most obsessive break up/love song ever recorded. Seriously, listen to the lyrics and listen to her play it live. She effing blows my mind.

I watched the video and it's awesome (go to my facebook to see it, i'm too lazy to snag the link again.) and it transported me back to a place and time in which I was crazy, stupid and broken hearted.

The last time my ex and I split was in June/July. I remember sitting in her kitchen after she'd avoided me for about a week, I waited for the bombshell that I knew was coming. Instead of the expected bombshell I got the "I'd like to see other people."* I shocked her by breaking into tears.*** She pressed on with her explanation of why. I continued to cry. It was one of those break ups you expect and see it coming for awhile and frankly it was long past due. She fully expected me to tell her sure I'd like to see you while you see other women. I again shocked her by saying that I don't share well and no. She cried and asked me to think about it. I reiterated no.

I felt strangely free after those words were said.****

I went home and made her a mix CD, well, after visiting a friend and drinking a few celebratory beers. The last song was Rid of Me. She didn't get it. She called me up to tell me she didn't get it and called the CD weird. Sigh. She missed the point entirely. Rid of Me is about obsessive, heart wrenching, gut churning love and breaking up. It's the raw cheated on broken heart. Rid of Me is the aftermath of love that should never have been.

The funny part about this is, though my ex didn't GET Rid of Me***** and thought it was weird she definately suffered from what I now refer to as "Rid of Me" syndrome: post break up insanity. Which is a whole otherset of stories, which I'll not share here as I know my ex, or her grilfriend read the blog on occasion.**

 

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Make Time

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As I make time for art the more my passion for it grows. It becomes a more important part of my day and my routine every day. Every time I force myself to sit down with a pencil and my sketchbook to draw another free fruit, I'm reminded that this is what I love to do.

I took a small painting into my coworker who snagged me the free and gorgeous lemons last week. She was ecstatic. Something that was a simple throw away practice sketch to me made her day. She told me later in conversation that her nephew is into art but he keeps talking about waiting until he has time.

IF you wait until you have time, you'll run out of it.

Jonathan Manning wrote about how there are moments in your life that open your eyes and show you that you have to do stuff, and do it now before you run out of time. His blog is the Artistic Biker (if you aren't reading on a regular basis please do so starting now, and I'll forgive you for not reading his stuff earlier).

When I was in my first year of college my Grandfather, whom I was very close with, was diagnosed with lung cancer. He'd spent his whole life working, working hard and saying things like "When I retire I'm buying a set of oil paints and taking some classes" and "When I retire, I'm going to drive to California and swim in the Pacific." Well, he retired and a year later he was diagnosed with cancer and the summer between my 2nd and 3rd year he passed away. Many of those "When I retire" goals never realized. That has always stuck with me, and mostly the fact that he had all sorts and hopes and dreams that he was waiting to realize and never did. 

So, if you don't make time for "it" whatever big thing it is in your life you want to realize you could never end up doing it. Make time for it now, even if it's only 10 or 15 minutes a day. If my grandfather had taken a painting course when he was 50 He'd have gotten 17 good years of painting. One of the last things he told me was that he wanted me to do everything I wanted and not to put it off, a powerful message for a 20 year old girl from a dying man.

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Plywood Versus Hardboard

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A month or so ago I wrote about how I purchased both a 2x4ft piece of 1/4 in thick birch plywood and the same in hardboard. I wanted to figure out which I liked best in terms of ease of use, preparation time and that sort of thing.

Here are my results:

Birch plywood was easy on the saw, with simple measurements I was able to pull a straight line with my circular saw. It chewed through it easily. I was even able to double stack it and cut through a double stack.

The hardboard one the other hand needed a firm hand for cutting or the saw would pull to the side and leave me with uneven sides. I tried double stacking it just for giggles, bad idea, it bound the saw up and made a mess of it.

For the record I'm using a black and decker 18V cordless circular saw with a 6 inch blade. (I think)

For gessoing I use a thinned gesso for the first coat, so it gets down into the fibers and really bonds with the surface. For the second coat I add some titanium white to the gesso to increase it's opacity. the last layer(s) are straight out of the bottle gesso. I'm pretty neurotic about brushing each coat in perpendicular directions to one another. This creates a really nice texture that I love.

The birch plywood dried really fast. The gesso went on smooth and with no skipping or strokes pulling away from one another. The plywood took 3 coats for a nice even coat that did not show the grain of the wood.

The hardboard dried much more slowly. The brush strokes sat more on the surface of it and the thinned gesso had a tendency for the strokes to pull away from one another. This tendency went away as more coats were applied. To get an evenly applied and opaque covering that was sufficiently white I needed to apply 4 coats of gesso.

Overall for my purposes the birch plywood wins out. It's slightly more expensive but the fact that it cuts more easily and uses less gesso means I spend less time preparing it's surface and can get to the business of art more quickly.

Support Your Favorite Artists

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I was chatting with one of my friends the other day about being supportive of our favorite artists online. There are of course many ways of going about this but we came up with a short list, feel free to add to it in the comments:

#1 Retweeting their tweets on twitter

#2 Sharing their Facebook posts, for that matter "LIKE"ing their facebook presence

#3 Watching their UStream

#4 Commenting on their blog posts, facebook posts, flickr and responding to tweets.

#5 Posting links on Facebook and Twitter to their blogs

#6 If you buy a piece from them, you can mention how awesome it is on YOUR blog, twitter and facebook

#7 Mentioning them during your UStream broadcasts

#8 Networking with other artists outside the internets.

One of the things that I think is commonly lost is that we are a community of artists, even if we are worldwide and may never meet in person, we are a community and we need to support each other for success. The days of gallery system competition can be brought down if we support each other rather than cut each others throat.