Finally Moved!

Well, the month of May was completely insane. We went to Texas, moved, and also managed to spend about a week and a half up in Steamboat Springs finishing one of the houses that Nate was building so it would be ready for closing on May 31st.

Now that it's June and things are a bit slower, I've managed to get my studio in working order and actually PAINT!! That's not to say that my studio is completely organized and ready to go, but I have in place my easel and workbench, so it's enough for now.

The cool thing is that instead of being forced to hang out by myself in the basement, I now get to paint inside the house like a real human being. My studio is in a loft space on the second floor of the house, which is nice and out of the way, but also close to everything. Now I can paint when Aspen is napping, which is a big deal, and I don't have to worry about freezing in the winter and keeping bugs out of the studio in the summer.

Here are a couple of pictures of what I've got so far. It's a bit smaller than my old space, but I can still back up a good 14 feet from my paintings to look at them, which is my only real space requirement. It has a big window that lets in almost North facing light during the day, which is nice. I'm still working on lighting for evening - luckily it's summer and the days are long, so I'm not too worried about it yet.


Everytime I walk into the room I have an overpowering urge to push my easel into the corner where it can be diagonal and not look so enormous and out of place, but it's positioned where it is so that I don't get glare on my canvas, so there it will stay. I'm planning to eventually install some track lighting and a hanging system on the big blank wall above my workbench, so I can preview my paintings before I finish and frame them.


The painting on the easel is a 24x36" commission of the Mt. of the Holy Cross for a guy who has climbed the mountain numerous times. I'm trying to make it look rugged, so he can use it to brag about his climbing experiences - a "pretty" picture just wouldn't do it in this case.

Anyhow, all that's left to do is organize my enormous pile of unused frames (not shown),and get all of my blank canvases and panels organized into their slots underneath the workbench. I realized in the move that I have a huge pile of gold frames. They're all beautiful frames, but remain unused because my paintings tend to look terrible in gold. I usually use dark frames with a gold liner, and my paintings actually look best in a "silver" metal leaf finish (which isn't actually silver at all - it looks quite a lot like my gold wedding band - but doesn't have the bright yellow-y gold tone of a lot of metal leaf frames). I try to avoid the silver frames because the gallery doesn't love them, and I'm always trying new gold frames to try and find something that works. So far, I just have this pile of gold frames to show for it. Anyways, that can be a whole post for another day, so I'll stop rambling now.