I've resurfaced a painting project that I haven't touched since the beginning of April. It seems I've been incredibly wary about even doing this painting. I had the idea for it in July of 2002, had pretty much the means to pull it off that October, built the frame in November, streached, primed and gridded the canvas in January of 2003 and started the damn thing that March. I worked on it for a few days, crawling into April and then -
stopped. I forget why, but the painting lost my interest. Then, the school moved the next semester and all hell broke loose in terms of actual facilities I could paint. Basically, I didn't have a studio and the cubby hole I was given was in a place that they didn't allow the use of oil paints.
Then, someone stole my webcam at school, somehow, and even if I wanted to complete this painting/film, I couldn't. I bought a new one a few weeks ago and brought out this painting, psyched myself up and I've started again. Amazingly, the paints I premixed are still good enough to use! Well, most of them. Some of the ones that are almost entirely earth colors are nothing but dried paint in a container.
Of course, the new webcam doesn't work with my laptop, which is seeing the edge of end-of-life from the viewpoint of our throwaway culture of bigger,faster,newer,more! I've had to bring my main desktop to school and will have to each time I want to film. Considering that I've just gotten a different digital camera stolen right from my studio a few weeks ago - in the afternoon while people were working in and around the studios, doesn't make me feel too secure. Someone actually had their sketchbook stolen last week.
That's horrific.
To say I'm taking a risk bringing in my computer that has, basically my life's work for the past three years on it is a serious understatement. I'm crazy like that, though.
This painting project, when finished, will at least make it three actual paintings in this particular meta-project, and three, my friends, is the magic number. It's almost given that this painting will be shown in a gallery, it's just that I have about 5 solid days - meaning 24 x 5 hours of painting time of work ahead of me to finish.
It's absolutely disheartening to know almost exactly how long something will take, and also knowing I'm essentially painting blind. But, perhaps that's the whole point?
