I’ve spent the past two weeks trying to paint pretty much all of a mural, working title, “The Fucking Mural.” Aside from a misconceived blockout in house paint*, I hadn’t done any work on it until about two weeks ago. I have about three more hours this morning, not counting packing for the weekend (see below) and breakfast, and then…it needs to be finished. It’s almost done. Just the detail in some of the mountains, the talus, this little section in the lower left, and the bit under the wall sconce. I’m a little punchy.
My deadline is so tight because I’m also about to go on a trip. I’m going to the Grand Canyon over the weekend, and then I have about twelve hours back home, and then I’m going to Europe for five months to paint and draw things that are not murals.** I was not originally planning to have to take much time off at all, but a bunch of stable houseguest arrangements crumbled just recently, and now I’m gonna be in hostels for most of my trip. I’m hoping to keep up with feministe, and I’m sure I’ll be plenty homesick, but things are up in the air. I will have a stable address from the end of July though the end of August, so I’ll be back then.
So I nominated a guest-blogger, one I’m sure you’ll all be glad to see, and will be lining up other guest-bloggers as I go. Assuming I actually do lose internet access, I’ll miss all of you.
*House paint is far cheaper than artist quality oil paint. The texture and quality’s somewhat different, but the biggest problem is that you can’t really select the colors all that carefully. Artist paints are standardized–there are some variations from brand to brand, but you get to assume that “cadmium yellow” is a bright sunny yellow that mixes sunlit greens and warm oranges, whereas “alizarin crimson” is a cool dark red good for eggplant purples and soft greys. Artist paints typically do not have names like Kittredge Point Memories, Plum Bake, Salmon Pearl, and Delicate Orchid. I had no idea what the hell I was purchasing, not on the level I needed in order to actually use the paint. Was Midnight Dove anything like prussian blue? Would it mix well with December Sky? Would Scandinavian Blue, Brilliant Blue, or Montana Blue be closer to ultramarine? Was it just a really bad idea to buy a color whose name started with Las Vegas? I ended up trying to paint the mural with colors selected more or less at random, and it showed. Even the undertone, which was supposed to be a nice yellow ochre (and yeah, we bought and swabbed on samples of all of these), turned out like something that really should have been in the “fair warning, it’s bright orange” name family. Harvest Melange, or Adobe Sunset, or Pumpkin Spice. Now I’m using artist quality paint, and it’s suddenly like painting a picture on a wall.
**Okay, so maybe it was a bad idea to agree to paint a mural right before leaving the country for half the year. At least now I know exactly how long it takes me to paint a mural, give or take a few hours, right?