Der Traum

This has to be the strangest thing I've ever found in an alley - several sets of plaster teeth:



A little black box just sitting on top of a dumpster getting rained on. Of course I had to see what was inside the little drawers, and of course I had to stow it in my bag when I discovered what was inside.

I redesigned my art website last night, www.sarahkretchmer.com

I also finished a new painting:


I'm having new business cards printed at Kinko's today. The old ones didn't have current info and had images of my old paintings on them, so aside from the email address they were obsolete. Kinko's does such a crappy job, but they're good in a pinch. One of these days I'll get my act together and get some moo cards again - I loved my mini moo cards.

Soggy Fourth
20"x20"

After getting back from brunch with madresal  I took a two hour nap during which I could not sleep but was able to pleasantly dose. Got up around 4, took a shower and worked on this painting for three hours. Now for some dinner and then it's off to see some fireworks – thank God the rain finally stopped.

Last August my grandmother passed away, and I inherited her set of gilded china. Last weekend I took a car over to my parents and loaded it up with boxes of dishes and transported them here to my studio, where they remain in their boxes near the front door. I wonder what I'm going to do with them. I've never hosted a big formal dinner party and don't really see myself doing so in the foreseeable future... I'm certainly not going to get rid of the dishes, but they're kind of an albatross around my neck. I suppose I'll stash them up on a shelf in my storeroom for now, and who knows, maybe I'll throw a big formal dinner party some time JUST to use them.

I finished this early this morning:

20"x20"

My job has pretty much dominated my life for the past couple months, and in every scrap of time that I haven't been working on projects for my day job, I've been working on my paintings.

Life has been a blur of work, punctuated by non-work experiences. A visit with my family last weekend. Dinner with a friend after work last week. Some time with W over at his studio on Sunday.

Finished this last night:


I had a good dream last night, but no longer remember what it was.

I worked on a painting today.

Untitled, 12"x24"

The power went out last night for about twenty minutes, and it was kind of nice. I lit some candles and enjoyed the silence for a bit before turning in.

Woke up at 5am this morning in a pool of sweat and nightmares about ticking time-bombs bolted inside of me still dancing in my head*. The air conditioner seems to have stopped working and I wonder if it has something to do with the power outage. Thank God I have ceiling fans.

I went out to the suburbs to go to a yoga class with my mom. She's been diagnosed with osteoporosis and her doctor told her that doing yoga would help, but she was reluctant to go by herself. Whenever I would ask her if she was taking a yoga class yet she would throw out a barrage of excuses why she couldn't go - she didn't know where they taught classes, didn't know where to find information, was afraid she'd have to sign up for a "course", etc, etc. So I called her up last week and said that "I was thinking of taking a yoga class" and "would she like to join me?" She was overjoyed by the suggestion, and we had a lot of fun today.

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*the time-bomb had been placed in a large, hollow cavity in my torso. My mission was to deliver the bomb to a specific point behind enemy lines, and the doctors had assured me that once I got there I would be able to unscrew and remove the bomb with plenty of time to reach safety. However, once I was at the designated spot I found that the bomb had actually been bolted onto me and there was no way to remove it. I clawed at my torso until I inevitably blew up.

Finished a painting last night, the first one in a while.

Work has been out of control; I come in an hour early and leave an hour late, only to take work home with me to do at night. I did a magazine ad for a basketball shoe; it's going into production and everything. Had to work with a photographer and do a photo shoot. Somehow I've managed to continue working on my paintings in the scraps of time that I do get - I get up an hour early to paint in the morning, and then always do some more work before I go to bed at night. I'm left exhausted, but it's the only way.

This is the one I finished up last night. I curled the top edge over and tacked it onto the back, and I may or may not do the same to the bottom edge:



I finished this one last week. It's got an asphalt top-layer which has yet to dry completely. It'll probably take a month before it's hard. I've left the edges wild for now but will probably tidy them up at some point:

Today I am a ruin.

Today I'm freaking myself out by reading about paint and paint dust toxicity. I'm mainly using latex paints, but then there's the asphalt, and the metallic paints, and they have pretty scary MSDS's. There is never NOT paint drying in my apartment, and with my lack of open-able windows (I have glass block windows) I'm becoming concerned that I'm going to gradually poison myself. And the paint dust that gets kicked up when I sand down the surfaces? Christ that stuff is toxic.

Why does everything that's fun or yummy have to be totally evil? really. wtf.

I just discovered I have central air conditioning!
It's utterly magical to be living in a legitimately nice place.

I've re-worked it. Something about it wasn't working quite right before, but now it has some punch, some dynamism.

My new blog site is also coming along, too.

Slowly but surely. Now I'm off to Home Depot to get some paint; I've got a Zipcar reserved for the next three hours, so I can get as much as I need and not worry about how I'm going to get it home. Pretty awesome.

I'm loving the way this piece turned out.

I built and prepped two new canvases this morning before heading in to work. My new neighbors must hate me... I always feel like such an asshole when I'm hammering and drilling away at 6am, but damn. When else do I have the time? Tonight I'm meeting up with my parents for dinner here in the city, maybe at the Russian Tea Room or at Frontera Grill.

I worked on the red and green painting for three hours last night and had a horrible time. I had to keep wiping it down because I just couldn't get it right; I really like this painting and it would be so easy to fuck it up. It was just one of those nights where nothing I did was any good - NOTHING, and I was sobbing and cursing and there was thinner everywhere and I was surrounded by soiled paper towels and wads of masking tape and open cans of paint. I should have stopped after the first few attempts went south, but I couldn't let it go. Around midnight I wiped the canvas down one last time and gave up, feeling completely defeated.

And then I made a discovery that will revolutionize how I move forward with my work. Rather than build a bonfire of every painting I've ever done and declare myself a failed artist, and rather than call it quits and go to bed, I got a small glass of water and a #6 brush and started wetting down some of the areas on Glasser. I needed to move forward with something, anything, and I figured that I could do a quick experiment with glaze and then call it a night. Instead, what I discovered was a way to brighten the colors of my paintings - not by rubbing them with oil (which renders the paper transparent, but ultimately yellows the surface and accelerates decay) - but by removing the lint and pulp from the surface of my paintings without damaging the paint below.

This is the holy grail I've been searching for. A way to have a clean surface without the use of a resin or oil. I stayed up until 1:30am removing layers of pulp, and then got up early this morning to continue. It's slow going, but it's effective.

You can see the bright colors starting to show through in the areas where I have worked, primarily on the top and left:

Glasser,
20"x20"
paint, paper & asphalt on canvas

In other news, I saw a building being demolished on my way in to work. I wonder who lived in the pink room.

Glasser
20"x20"
paper, paint & asphalt on canvas

The Firehouse at Dawn
20"x20"
paper, paint & asphalt on canvas

I didn't sand this one down at all, just cut down the strips hanging off the left and right sides, leaving the stuff at the top and the bottom. I like the imperfection, and how it looks both clean and messed up at the same time.

I just got a new pair of boots because I totally needed them:

Last night I was able to publish an entry to my new blog template. So now that the main entry portion is figured out, I can move on to figuring everything else out. Comments, photos...everything that will make this a fully functioning blog. I need to build out the other pages, too (comments, user info, etc.) because right now they either don't exist or, as is the case when you click on a headline to see the permalink, the code falls off the template and the page loses its structure. I'm getting there, though. Slowly but surely.

My work in progress:
The new blog