ART
is the theme this week at Photo Friday. No problem doing this one! I'm getting ready for a show in May at a NYC gallery, and so am painting my head off. My studio is very cold in the winter, which keeps the paint from drying as fast as I would like. So when Henry is at school during the week I set up a drying studio in his room, which is very sunny and warm. On overcast days and in the evening I also have lamps set up, to help the paint set up a little faster.

Many oil painters will find this incredibly odd. It's an unfashionable technique, the building up of slow layers. Nowadays it's mostly about "from the hip" painting, or alla prima, done all at once. I absolutely can work in that style too, and do when I am painting out of doors, or from a one-time model. But for my studio work, I like to build a painting up slowly in layers, and so the paint must dry to the touch in between sessions. I currently have fourteen paintings in various stages of completion.

My method seems to flummox a lot of other artists. But I am the kind of person who can be reading several different books at once, too. I never get them mixed up, and always remember where I left off with each one, and its very much the same with the paintings. So maybe its more of a how one's brain works thing, rather than a purely aesthetic thing?