I never thought there would come a day where I would be swapping out my drums for something like air conditioning, but that’s exactly what I have decided to do.

My drums are no longer in this corner of the room. I know it seems like a window unit would not be taking up any kind of footprint, but in a way it does. My brush cabinet sits in front of that window as you can see. Now it will need to be moved over to the right where the drums used to be. The drums just don’t fit between the canvases and the cabinet because of the way the drums need to be situated. It just works out that way. It will also give me a tiny bit more canvas storage, which is much needed!

Until my AC unit comes, my studio is in total disarray.

It’s been hot and I almost want to wait until after the weekend before I put all this stuff away. The unit will be installed by then and I can get all this stuff cleaned up and put away in a nice cool room.

Until then, I’ve been having painting epiphanies and dumping all my plans out the window, speaking of windows – ha. I’ve had reference images and sketches to do a continuation of more paintings like my most recent one for a long time and I think I just want to skip that for now and try something entirely new again. Yup. Something new again, again. Isn’t that just like me? We’ll see just how new it really looks in the end, but I want to challenge myself a bit now. Turn the table a tad and see what happens if I paint without a ghosting a sketch on my panel first. I also want to just use paint. No collage.

I pretty much did that when I painted this thing:

If anyone happened to be following my blog from back then, I had a horrible time getting through this particular painting. Well, I say a horrible time, but it was a major challenge and in actuality, I really like challenges. I would like to try it again and get back to this more imaginative and looser interpretation of my photos.

In the case of the above, the challenge was to look at the reference during the first session – during the under painting session – and never look at it again. I just filled in the blanks on my own and make shit up. It had me going crazy because I lost all the different plains and little houses in the distance. I wound up simplifying it and using a bigger brush. It was only a 16 x 20 inch canvas, so I could only put in so much detail anyway. And I hated it at first until I got some space away from it. Then I liked it.

That phenomenon has happened a few times – where I’ve worked on something for a long time and hated it when it was finished and turned it to the wall and a week later it’s become one of my favorite paintings. There’s such thing as being too close to something, too involved, that you can’t see it anymore. Forest for the trees or something that they say.

In any case, I am excited to get back to it, in a nice cool environment. I’ve been taking shots of Los Angeles hillside landscapes and that will be my new “subject matter.”