Beware the Zone

A painting a week.. that was the plan, and six weeks into it, so far so good. They don' t all have to be new, because I have a few older canvas's with ideas that need another going over, but five out of the six of them are. I have done my (Malcome Gladwell) ten thousand hours so I'm pretty fast now, but a painting still takes at least thirty hours and about five hours into it I still always wonder what the hell I was thinking.

I paint smaller than I used to, for practical purposes; The studio is a little house and people barely have paintings in their homes..let alone big ones , but there's another quality of life, secret reason I paint smaller now, and that is that there's really nothing like being able to paint in my bed on any crappy Canadian weather day.. ha ha ha shhh.

The subject matter can be benign because sometimes painting should be an exercise in aesthetics, and sometimes it's benign until I see the twist, and then it isn't, and that is when I'm in the zone. The creativity zone..mmm creativity .. it's the secret to a happy life you know... no “talent” necessary. Painting has a zone too.. it happens after you “figure it out” and you can just paint.

Ultimately, in this creativity zone one painting begins to beget the next and interesting things can happen... I hope.. haha..stay tuned

Cindy has a Blog?

My reluctance to reveal myself has now been surpassed by my need to find a bigger audience for my work, and as apart of the strategy to address this I have decided to blog. I'm having a show of my paintings in June and a public declaration of my intention is just the kind of motivation I can use.
I don't usually make new years resolutions, but this year I thought to myself, as opposed to announcing it (as if anyone would have cared) that one way of enjoying my life more would be to entertain a little. As in.. what's the use of having such wonderful friends and being in touch with all these people that the Internet now allows me to be, if I never see them? And how can I ever expect to see them if I don't invite them. And what a lovely place to be able to invite them to. Not just my studio, but the beautiful village of Belfountain, in which it is situated, with tons of fun things to do in the surrounding area . And that is the evolution of thought that lead me to the conclusion that a blog was a really good way to not only offer my work and studio up to people I know for a specific event, but to offer it up to people I am yet to know in a more virtual sense.
Of course there is the work, and when I first imagined a blog I imagined some semblance of artistic musings along with the obligatory visuals ..and that there shall be ... however there is something to be said against over exposure .... after all who will come and see me if they've seen it all before.. this balanced against the fact that most of my potential audience will never cross the threshold of my studio leads me to suspect I shall always be walking a fine line in this regard. The other thing is that no artist or art exists in a vacuum so I therefore and inevitably reserve the right to comment on anything and everything, art related or not, in this blog .. consider yourself warned.
When I told my thirteen year old son I was going to create a blog he responded with a simple “fail”.. I laughed and thought to myself ..ha I must surely be on to something now
So that's it, my first post. Stay tuned for more.. an introduction to my work and the life experience that inspires it ..