philosophizing

well, i’m not quite finished painting my house, but it’s an amazing transition, and totally worth all the time and effort. i’m an early riser, usually up before the sun, and this morning i noticed that the new house color, which is a sort of redwood/red/brown, makes the light inside the house seem warmer at sunrise. i don’t know if it’s the way the new color absorbs the sunlight, or if it’s some kind of refraction or reflection, or if it’s just my imagination, but it’s really nice, and i like it.

it reminds me of an email i got from a woman who commissioned a painting. i’m behind in my commissions, due to the unexpected onset of barkwheats (no complaints, only cheers!), but i’m about to get back on track with them. i’d emailed this particular client a couple of weeks ago to ask what kind of background she was thinking about for the painting of her two awesome dogs. i sent her to my gallery page so she could get an idea of what colors she might be interested in. her response was so beautiful that i’m posting a bunch of it here:

“I’m … looking at all your backgrounds of all your dogs on the website.  One sticks in my mind.  If you go 9 rows down on the gallery page the one in the middle (2nd one from left)– there’s a yellow-ish guy with flopped over ears.  The background is magenta-ish, with some nice depth to it, and looks like a cloudy sunset just before rain.  The Navajo have a ceremony called the Blessing Way that starts like this:

In the house made of dawn
In the house made of sunset light
In the house made of rain clouds…
With beauty before us, we walk
That yellow dog’s background reminds me of that imagery.

What do you think?  Would it work with our knucklehead twins and their colors?  Be honest.  I just dream; you paint what it is you dream.”

this blew me away. what a lady. i can’t WAIT to paint her dogs.

this weekend, while painting my house, i had this sort of epiphany …. that painting is really just pushing around some pigment with a brush. controlling it, if you will. for the most part, i can be fairly sloppy on the house: throw the paint on, move it around some, et voila — total exterior makeover. it’s really rewarding to see the fruits of your labor so quickly.

of course, painting isn’t really just pushing around pigment. there’s a concept involved, and usually a goal that’s more specific than ‘i want to turn my blue house brown.’ one of the things that i love about painting folk dogs is that often i never know what i’m going to get. the dogs seem to take on a life of their own once i start filling them out. it’s not as if they’re directing me, necessarily, but there’s a sense of freedom and exploration that each dog gives me.

someone asked me the other day how many folk dogs i’ve painted. i don’t really know, to be honest. i’ve been painting these guys in earnest for the last 18 months or so, and i’ve probably painted close to 120 dogs. that’s about 1.5 paintings per week. sometimes, when i have three or four easels out, it’s overwhelming. painting starts feeling like a job, instead of something i began doing as a hobby. and i have to remind myself that this is a **good** thing.

last night i was working on the ginger & parsley canvas for barkwheats … and i ran into some issues that i haven’t really encountered before. by pushing some paint around though, i got them resolved in fairly short order. and even though the problem-solving was a little bit of work, it was totally worth it in the end, because it only added to my so-called ‘toolbox’ when it comes to painting.

i think there might be a lot of mixed metaphors in this entry, and i’m not sure what the point is. i know that i’m grateful for the folk dogs — for the freedom they give me, and for the challenges they present. standing in my “studio” (which is really just a little space off the kitchen) and looking at easels of folk dogs in various stages of grinning back is one of the most rewarding things in my life, and something i do not take for granted, even when it’s “work.”