When you find you have excess.
Or alternately titled Count the Days.
I know a lot of artists. And I’ve seen their studios. No one who paints is without a pile of artwork lying around collecting dust! I know that. We are guilty of hoarding. Not on purpose, mind you, there just isn’t enough walls in the family to hang everything. That’s one reason I stopped working on huge canvases. I love painting large. My dragon is 4 ft by 9 ft. Needless to say he spends most of his life in a cave (just like in the story) face to the wall, in my studio.
I have three long tables my son-in-law built for me out of particle board. Big tables 6 ft long. Under them are, you guessed it, paintings. Portraits, plein air, experiments, what not. Along my other wall are more paintings. These are framed. Some of my favorites. They are lined up against each other with cardboard between them. My studio is an attic so the roof is slanted which makes it difficult to hang things, but I do have some of my favorite framed pieces hanging.
I have seven children. All of them have houses whose walls are lined with paintings. l have literally painted myself in a hole. I pity my poor kids when I’m gone. They’re going to have quite a dilemma trying to figure out what to do with all this stuff.
We won’t mention the cubicle filled with costumes. Not just ratty costumes. Expensive ones that we used for Ian’s Realm and Cassandra’s Castle filming. I can’t figure out what to do with it all. I am sure my heirs won’t either. I paid too much money for them to give them away. But it seems I’m the only dummy who would spend a fortune on period clothing that would sit on a rack for years.
What I’m getting at is, since a lot of my best paintings are no longer with me (they sold, yay), I’ve decided to make a calendar to remember them by and thus distribute my artwork among the poorer crowds (i.e. everyone I know who can’t afford an original…which seems to be everyone I know). We shall let the paintings take their place as furniture under my table and against my walls, and instead plaster their images onto paper whereby we all can count the days passing away before us.
Meet my new Kickstarter material, my calendar. I’ve tossed in my two coloring books and a favorite little Christmas novella The Far Side of Heaven. More about that book another day, another post.
Please follow along and see how this pans out for me!
Making Believe 