Sometimes it gets difficult to find the time to do as much painting as I’d like. I need to paint often to fulfill two needs: 1) The obvious love and desire to paint and create beautiful images, to recreate my memories in a way that transcends the photograph and captures the sentiment in a way that I have total control over. And 2) to produce inventory so I have a variety of pieces my clients can choose from, or in case I suddenly need 10 paintings to do a show somewhere. But with working a full time job that occupies about 55 hours of my week (travel time included there), and being on a swing dance team (the Fly Rights) that competes at the national level, having my beautiful girlfriend Alison in my life, and of course finding some time in there to sleep for a few hours a day, sometimes my painting takes a backseat for a few days.
It makes me sad when I walk by my studio in the house and see an unfinished piece staring at me. The temptation to walk over to it, to start scrutinizing it and finding areas I need to work on, to put just a little dab of a few paints on my palette and maybe work out one little bit … it’s rough when I look at the time and realize I have to run out of the house! Sometimes when it’s late at night, and I know I should be heading for bead, I will decide to stay up that extra hour and a half because I know I am so close to finishing a piece. And when I’m a train wreck in the morning getting out of bed, I feel it’s worth it because I have one more beautiful memory successfully captured that I can share with the world.
This weekend Alison will be working all day Saturday and Sunday, and she’ll even need to take my car to get to work. Which will leave me stranded at home. And as much as I will miss not being able to spend time with her during those precious weekend hours, I can’t say I’ll be complaining because I will have an entire weekend to focus on my craft. And that makes me happy. Because I know she’ll be home eventually, and I can put my paints aside – satiated for the moment – and spend some fun time with her.
ah, yes, but I was home that weekend. And I enjoyed being in the room with you as you painted the hours away:) Beautiful creations.