It occurred to me today, that I haven’t done any painting since mid-April (other than the “rustic style” signs that I painted above to mark locations on the property). This is the longest I’ve gone without setting paint brush to canvas since we arrived on the upper Sunshine Coast last November. It’s not that I haven’t been busy: We’ve been down to Vancouver on a couple of trips, spent several weeks building an outdoor kitchen (including some nifty counter-top/cupboards made from all the left-over cuts from the big ramp), hauled a ton of dead brush and fallen trees off the slope of the bluff, started two gardens along the ramp down to the beach, hauled endless heavy stones off the beach and up the ramp to create terraces along the slope of the bluff, and cleared/setup a campsite for visitors.
Although I may feel good about all the projects that have been accomplished since we moved onto the Bluff at the start of May, my inner artist is feeling utterly neglected. I even built myself a nifty paint-brush washing station out of left over wood. It allows me to wash off my paint brushes without having any acrylic paint go into the environment and while it may not be pretty it’s very functional. Each container in the picture below allows the paint to settle to the bottom. I store the fresh water in the blue Aqua-Park. I wash the brushes under this tap and the paint water goes into container A. After it fills up container A, it goes through a pipe into container B and after it fills that container up, it goes into container C. Each container allows the paint to sink to the bottom and by the time it goes out of the third container, it is pretty much paint free. The paint in the buckets can be put into a container and dropped off at a paint recycling center. This is the prototype for the paint brush washing sink that I’ll have built into my art studio, so that I can avoid acrylic paint sludge going into our septic field. Anyway, the main point of this is that I have no reason to NOT setup a painting space and start doing some plein air painting on Twin Eagles Bluff.
I’ve also got no shortage of painting ideas, the trick is to figure out what my next painting challenge is going to be. I actually enjoy the initial part of the process while I’m going through various ideas, doing some preliminary sketches and thinking about what I want to create. To help me understand this process better and kick my butt into gear on a new painting, I’ll do my next blog on this topic.