Yesterday, I had a post ready to go but then I bought a new-to-me easel and had to rearrange the studio and my storage to accommodate the purchase. As you can see from the photo, once I moved things around, the easel was a perfect fit. You can see the comfy chair by the window where I write and have my morning coffee too. It’s Yard Sale Weekend in Provincetown, a long-established tradition because so many of the summer residents leave after Columbus, or as we say on Cape Cod, Indigenous Peoples Day. In addition to the easel, I bought a box of almost new sixty half sticks of the brand of pastels I’ve been using along with charcoal I am mixing with gesso lately. Oh, and a very sturdy, lockable archival hard case to carry art to the UK the next time I visit. And I only spent $60 on all three - yay!

I’ve been up painting in the middle of the night again, it’s a difficult habit to break. A couple of nights ago, I went to do a final touch to Witness, the piece above, but when I sprayed it with fixative, the fixative pooled into a nasty puddle that I had to clean up right away. Which also took off a bunch of color and I ended up scrubbing the whole piece down and starting over basically from scratch. It had looked like my usual work, lots of detail and texture, but I decided the fixative drama was a sign to do something less expected and more akin to how I see things closeup since the cataract surgery. Below is Witness in its earliest stage. Most of my work starts out like this. I love that simplicity and always miss it in the finished work but I’m learning to put the brush down before I revert to texture and detail again.

Witness works, as does Prophet, also charcoal and gesso, below. It harkens back to what the Bird series was originally about - my reaction to the 2016 election results. And since you-know-who never left, even during Biden’s term, the series continues. I slip in and out of creating images that are more viewer friendly, more sellable to the general public, but the gallery season is over in Provincetown so whatever happens in the studio now will just be part of my learning curve since I never stop developing as an artist. As it should be. The charcoal studies I posted last week were in preparation for the collection I’ve started here with Witness and Prophet. And now that I have an easel, I can go a lot bigger, as we head into the midterms and whatever chaos ensues afterwards. I got my mail-in ballot on Friday and I will be marching it over to Town Hall next week. I have no words for what’s going on these days, okay, I have plenty, but all I really can do is paint. Which I’ll be doing shortly - on with the day.