A year of Poverty, Painting and Food: Twelve years in catering over, my aim is to paint full time. Stu, my other half, is stuck as a chef feeding the x-thousand over an Edinburgh winter. His cooking tips and budgeting are propelling us through the year on a tenner a day, while I paint.. No comparison to Pablo's talent; I have just named my blog after the Paris studio where he suffered the twin purgatory of poverty and artistic ambition on the cusp.. I am emerging!

Thursday, 4 November 2010

Bubble Wrap

Where would we be without it? I tend to have a couple of sheets in the back of my car permanently to wrap pictures, probably making it look as if I sleep there, but the bubbly plastic wrap has become the saviour of painting packagers everywhere. Luckily I am a recycler of the stuff and have a few suitcases full because tonight was the wrapping of the first show to leave the house for Christmas... It has to be said that the course of bubbling does not run smooth with a cat in the house, and Twig did what they do best and chewed string, ran off with masking tape and leapt with gay abandon onto any piece of wrap that moved, yowling gleefully. But hey, that was to be expected. Importantly the whole mission was accomplished without loss of life or the insertion of tape or string into Twig's stomach (or screws for that matter, they were also fair game as toys) and all five pictures are now safely stashed in the hall where the clawed beasts cannot venture and turn my hard work to plastic ribbons.
Also managed a job that has been sitting waiting on my attention for about nine months now; the contents of my desk drawer. These were removed to a cardboard box in the hall (now occupied by the paintings, which is the only reason that the job is now done) when Stu started renovating my desk way back in the spring. Logic told me that if I hadn't needed anything in said box over the course of this time, which indeed I hadn't, then the best course of action was probably to chuck the lot, but I persisted and found among the rubbish a few gems of usefulness. Okay; I found an awful lot of pens with no writing capability, an awful lot of notes and lists written on scraps of paper, a few old bills and a collection of useful cards and leaflets pertaining to shows and galleries. Nothing that would have been missed, admittedly, but some worthy things saved.

Twig is, naturally, now in proud possession of the box and will remain so for the evening, after which she will have no interest whatsoever in it ever again. It will, however, probably remain in the middle of the living room floor for at least a week before it is rehomed. And gawd bless 'er if she isn't rummaging in my handbag and making off with a banana found therein; why? Keeps my on my toes...

Set myself a fairly easy schedule for tonight and have now completed the tasks and am off for a treat - reading in bed while awaiting Stu's late return. Varnished the new painting 'The Advent of Bun Hanzo' and nearly finished its framing, but I am out of tape so that will have to wait now until I am in the gallery on Sunday to purchase more. Also received proofs of the greetings cards I have been waiting on, which are to sell alongside the show in Ritchies (and no doubt use as my own Christmas cards); they look really good and I am pleased to have something like that done, as I realise not everyone is going to want to buy a painting, but at least I can send them away with a memory jogger in the form of my name and email on the back of a card.

And that, I think, is that for now; box canvases start tomorrow for various destinations, so that will be my evening occupation for the next three weeks until the main show hangs.

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