A Surprising Development

Since my old website hosting service contract was coming up for renewal, I decided to take the opportunity to revamp my website. It had been way too long since I'd spent any time looking at it. I'd just open it to do things like add a new painting or maybe to add a recent show to my exhibition list. 

My original thought was that after my long "downtime", I would use the site as an archive, loosely organized, to give people a sense of what I've done over the past nearly 20 years. Finding images of a lot of the work was hard. I'd had two hard drive crashes, one really bad one just last year, after which I was not able to recover any data at all (and after which I finally paid for cloud storage!), so going back into old computers and external drives as well as doing an image search online (thank you, bloggers who posted images of my work when you wrote about it!!), I finally gathered enough to give a pretty good idea of my work.

Before going through this process, I had made the decision, for reasons I may share in other posts, to leave oil painting behind and focus on collage. What I hadn't expected was that, while looking through the old paintings, sharing a few of my favorites on social media, and hearing really lovely feedback about them, I began to realize just how much I missed painting. I mean, it's been over three years since I had any kind of regular painting practice!

So I am about to move my studio into our home, a process I'll post about here. I was in the old studio taking inventory last week and was making lists of oil painting supplies I'd be selling or giving away. By the time I walked out of there, I'd decided to keep all the stretched canvases and some of the brushes and knives, and the oil paints, and one of the glass palettes, and yes, even my big easel. 

I guess it's time to make some new paintings.