Selling the Studio

Most of my art supplies are either in storage or hidden away so that the house would look perfect and clean while prospective buyers tromped through.  This isn't my home any longer.  It's my house, but not my home and not really my studio.  It's a room with a desk, a partially filled bookshelf and a cabinet with my art supplies hidden behind polka-dotted wrapping paper in the glass windows.

It was hard to have to remove all signs of art with a single exception (a painting too large and delicate to move or store).  Frustrated by the realtor's and stager's suggestion to "put a mirror or a simple print" over the fireplace and find nothing but junk or items too heavy to hang, I decided to make something.  It was pretty funny, actually, as I flipped through the pages of a book about encaustic work that I acquired with the intention of learning how to do it.  There was a simple piece that inspired me, so I raced off to Michael's and bought a canvas.  Working on the outdoor table, I quickly painted the surface, let it dry, then mixed more acrylic with a heavier body medium for texture and scraped it over the first layer.  Fine line details were added with a paint pen, and remnants of handmade paper proved perfect to whack up and apply with a matte medium.  I think I spent a total of fifteen minutes on this cheesy quick piece to fill a space on the wall.  The best part is that my funny husband wants to frame and keep it.

How fun to make something like a kid, not worrying about what anyone would think and just getting messy for a while!  I am inspired.

So the house hunting begins.  It will take 30 days from today for the house to transfer title to the new owners and we hand over the keys.  I love that fact that every house we look at to consider buying, the first thing my husband asks is which room would be best for a studio.

This is going to be a wild month.

Contractor's Silent Motto

Spray now, say "Oops" later and spend less time on the job.  I think that's it.

These last two weeks have been spent entirely in looney mode.  The only art I've produced is what a former co-worker called, "painting the sky blue."  This is code for cursing like a sailor.  My sky is a beautiful, deep shade of very, very blue.

The process of getting our house ready to sell is whackier than anything I could have imagined, not because of the mundane work of packing or tossing out junk (why do I have keys to cars I no longer own?), but because I have had a string of unbelievably poor quality workmanship on the part of the contractors.  Every day we take a couple of steps forward, then I discover a disaster and we take a huge step backward, the next day spent trying to repair or undo the damage. 

There were several days when we, along with all of our worldly goods, had to be out of the house so that the carpet could be removed and the hardwood floors, covered for decades, could be refinished.  All rooms of the house with hardwood floors were to be painted before the refinishing since it was not possible to tape down tarps to newly finished wood.  Alas, the floor guy did not take the same care on his end, leaving hand prints of stain on every single brushed nickel doorknob, some freshly painted walls and freshly painted doors.  Then there's the painter that painted windows shut (all of them), painted all of the hinges on the kitchen cabinets (46 of them) after we had several explicit conversations about not painting them, and the gentleman who repaired our deck, leaving old steel pipes sticking up out of the deck.  He was kind enough to paint them to match, but seriously?!?  Having the contractors fix their mistakes is necessary, but the time consumed with taking three steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, etc. is making me lose my mind and my patience. 

Is it just me?  I think like an artist and I look at these jobs as I would art.  The fact that these people are OK with sloppy work shocks me.  I can't imagine framing a piece of art crooked and ignoring that fact, or sewing a piece and having seams not quite closed and some stuffing popping out with dangling threads, or working on a collage piece and have a bit of trash stuck to it to be left behind and ignored as if no one would notice.  I would notice.  I would fix it.  I would be ashamed to do an incomplete or sloppy job and charge someone for the slop.

While we were away from the house and it was like a construction zone, we boarded my poor studio kitty Tabitha at the veterinarian.  The heat and humidity have been brutal recently, so we gave her a couple of extra days there while we tried to make the house inhabitable.  Look who is enjoying some sofa time indoors!  Poor Tabitha has been terrified of all of the new voices and the activity, retreating to her old "hidey hole" down by the pool, tucked away in the garden.  She's happy when everyone goes home and I can convince her to come indoors.  There is some good in the day after all :-)

Lastly, I have begun to rebuild my indoor studio.  The amount of furniture must be limited for the sake of showing the house, but I've got my desk, my cabinet of paints and glues and other goodies, plus my bookshelf.  I kept my dresser full of art bits and bobbles in the garage and hope to tackle at least a few ATCs this week, for sanity's sake of no other.

As a reward for neither committing homicide nor just flat out losing our minds with each other these last few weeks, my husband and I are going to enjoy seeing Tommy Chong at the local comedy club.  We could use a few laughs!

Who Dropped This Bomb?

Good grief, my house looks like a bomb has blown up.  Today was the first day with the movers, taking everything from both attics, the garage and the kitchen to a storage facility.  We'll stay a few days in a hotel, a week or two in the rental house, but most of our time in this house (after the repairs/remodeling is finished in a couple of weeks) until it is sold.  My daughter is in the rental with the cats, thus reducing mess by quite a bit.  Trying to figure out how to manage all of this is causing me to lose a lot of sleep.  I think I'm exhausted enough for this insomniac to be able to sleep leaning against a wall in a train station. 

In the hope of retaining SOME semblance of sanity, I agreed to participate in an art project that my sister is coordinating with a friend.  The project involves making inspirational ATC's with an ocean theme that will be given to school children as a reward of some sort.  That is something I can manage, even with limited studio supplies.  With my daughter moved into the rental house, the middle bedroom can, once again, become a studio.  It will have to be super neat, clean and tidy (I'm worried about that), but at least I'll be able to do something.  I've made the difficult decision to pack away all of my darned magazines and reference books into storage which, frankly, will force me to just make art and not get lost in other's works.  We'll see how that works :-)

Why Is My Mind Blank?

Today was a day with no excuses.  With increasing problems with back pain, ending up on medication and a heating pad every time I try scrubbing or tasks like vacuuming, I finally gave up and hired help.  So I've got two ladies cleaning away while I hide out in the studio, the perfect opportunity to make art and struggle with the guilt.  But my mind is blank.  I'm wrestling with the vast array of books and magazines at my fingertips and am trying not to pick them up and start flipping pages.  Flipping pages leads to more flipping of pages and not getting anything done.  Yikes!  OK, time to close the computer, pick up a tool or material and do something with it.  Get ready, get set, slam shut!

Moving On

Though I have moved frequently in my life (if I only count places where I lived six months or more, that's 19 by the time I was 29 years old), the logistics of the move were managed by my parents or, later in life, by my husband and I calling on all of our friends to help us load up the rental truck while we moved ourselves from one rented house or apartment to another in exchange for pizza and beer.  This time is going to be different and is quite likely to bring on an anxiety attack before the month is over.  We have never sold a home before or had real estate agents peeking into every nook and cranny of our house.  One doesn't realize how much crap one has accumulated until one has to open and expose the contents of closets, cabinets and drawers just prior to one having a coronary brought on by unbearable humiliation and embarrassment. Why did I feel the need to have what looks like 70 rolls of gift wrap?  Or save all of my holiday-themed magazine because there was a recipe or decorating idea somewhere in there that I might remember I had and wanted to use?  Good grief.  There's an entire forest worth of paper in my house.

So the drama begins.  I'm going to hire a housekeeper which makes me feel unbearably guilty, but my raggedy and worn out back won't let me do it all and keep up.  I'll take advantage of that time to go sweat in the studio so I am not underfoot while a total stranger tries to make my home look like a fabulous hotel.  I feel the coronary coming on now.  I finally have an excuse to replace the mailbox that has taken a few too many whacks from a baseball bat in the hands of teenagers with a car and too much time on their hands.  The new one will be installed out of teen arm reach.  There is so much to do, little of which includes making art.  I am going to make the effort to fit art time in, just so I don't totally lose my mind from the stress of it all.

Finished!

Yeah!  Pressure truly does work for me.  How sick is that?!?  Simply buying a commercial gift for my sister-in-law as she marks this milestone birthday was out of the question.  On the one hand I fret that this will seem too "crafty" for her, but on the other hand I know how much time and effort (and failed trials of possible methods of making it) went into the creation.  I'm just going to be done and enjoy the results and hope she likes it too.

My husband's father was a Methodist minister.  While the family didn't have a lot of money, they did manage to cover the country on summer vacations, packing four kids into their big car and dragging a trailer along for camping adventures.  They loved the beach, so I selected what I thought was the cutest photo of my sister-in-law from the 1950's on one of these holidays.

In putting this together, the biggest challenge for me was the depth and texture of the finished project.  The image is printed on heavy (compared to paper) canvas to which I stitched small beads and some bits of embroidery.  Putting this in a regular frame just wasn't going to work.  The frame is one of those deep ones designed for putting 3D objects on display.  I needed to give the work enough depth so that it wouldn't look too flat and just wrong for this type of frame.  Weight was another worry.  If the layers were too heavy, I worried that parts would fall off and plunk to the bottom of the frame next week.

The frame is a 12" square.  I found a page of commercial scrapbook paper that had images of torn maps on it, and painted over that to tone it down, adding the big "bubbles" to continue the shape of the beach ball.  The canvas is an 8 inch square.  To raise the canvas off of the backing paper, I cut a 7.5 inch piece of foam board, covered it with a piece of blue textured (image, not feel) heavy scrapbooking paper so that the sides were clean and finished, then topped it with a piece of bright white paper so that no blue showed through the canvas.  I adhered super fine white (and a pinch of pale teal) glitter on the side of this 7.5" square so that, if by any chance it was taken out of the frame, this support would have a nice finished appearance on the sides and look like sand.  I used a monster strength spray adhesive to attached the backing paper to the back of the frame, as well as for attaching the foam board to the center of that backing paper. I found super-strength adhesive dots and dashes in my supplies and ran a solid like of the dashes around the top edge of the foam board square, fitting the photo canvas on top of it and weighting it down for a while.  The fun final bit was finding real and very tiny sand dollars at the craft store to include also.

Once again, I'm a rotten photographer and can't seem to manage the issue of glare, but it's still finished and I'm glad!  Woohoo!

Another Re-Do

I feel like I'm always have to re-do work.  On the mom front, there is the re-do of dishes or vacuuming or whatever other chore my charming son insists he did well.  This is what the kitchen looked like after he said he did the dishes.  You can only see a peek of the very tall cups in the sink.  How does one overlook that (among other things)?


On the artist front, a complete re-do was in order for the current project.  So many details made me unhappy with it.  I think I over-did the beadwork, the size and scale was wrong, the posterization of the photo created a muddy-coloured image with skin too dark and ugly rusty brown.  My latest printer acquisition has proven to be quite the bear for me to manage.  It drinks ink like nothing I've ever witnessed in my life.  I think I can count on fingers and not have to move to toes the number of images I've printed since making the purchase, yet it required three new and separate coloured ink cartridges to keep working.  Then I had to spend an hour with Google trying to find someone, anyone, other than the goobers at Epson that could help with a printer selection issue.  After I got it to understand I wanted to print on a single canvas (by telling it I was printing on a roll of velvet art paper, go figure), it ate a canvas.  The beast sucked it in, sounded like it was printing, then mooshed it back and forth inside and stopped.  The entire canvas was inside the printer with no escape hatch.  A few choice words and whack later, I retrieved the almost usable canvas.  Almost.  I only had to print three to get what I wanted.

Again, I am not a good photographer and have a mediocre camera (I'd like to blame the camera more than the photographer, but I think I'd be lying), but here it is so far.  This is not assembled, just resting loosely together in the sun for the photo op.  I should note that I was inspired to stitch on the photo after seeing the work of artist Hagar Van Heummen (not sure I've spelled that correctly) whom I discovered on Pinterest.  Neat stuff.

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Tomorrow I get a break from the heat and the studio, joining my charming husband for a day of art in Laguna Beach.  It's that time of year!  I hope to revisit some of my favourite local artists and maybe pick up a new little something for the house, along with some inspiration and motivation.