Hello, bloggers!

To celebrate Rose’s birthday we always go to Key West for a couple nights.

So I knew when I left the studio last Friday that I wouldn’t be back till Tuesday.  That’s a long time to be away from my studio!

So I thought, I’ll have four days in between to be away...  How can I screw this up?

So before I left, I went to one of the smaller walls and mixed up a melange of a little bit of water, a lot of paint solvent, a little bit of polyurethane, and a huge roller, and rolled the whole thing on.

It was like Back to the Future, back many years ago when I first started using steam on a painting, and after painting the damn thing for about 2 months, I put it in the bathtub and steamed it, and the whole thing turned brown!

So once I found out what the solvents were doing, I thought, “I’ve been in this boat before...  I know what I’m going to do!”

I have shop cloths that I put on them like a bandage you put on a bleeding wound, and that soaked up some of the stuff.  Then I grabbed some 2-foot-by-3-foot pieces of paper and vigorously rubbed them, and like a man struggling to get up a cliff, plastered them across the wall in all different directions.

This time, my 28-year-ago endeavor with the same situation became very relevant, only this time it wasn’t steam, it was paint solvent.  Much to my glee, the paper that I was sopping up, became wonderful pieces on their own, so I laid them out on the table and turned the fans on and watched the fighting going on.

The dark colors started coming out like a dark lagoon, and I thought, “Wow!  This is going to give me something to go back and look at!”  I couldn’t wrench myself away from them!  They were shining through the darkness, almost like a dark night where you have a strobe light that just keeps penetrating and penetrating!

During the agitating period, I broke some bubbles of hidden color form the Windsor Newton, and that started to spring out and do all kinds of great things!

It delighted me, the place that my friendship with the drip is now taking me.  Instead of eliminating it, I try to become the arms and legs of it.  Before, I thought the drip was really interesting, and I thought about how I wanted to go down that road, but now all of a sudden I’m in Shangri La and I don’t know how I got there.

I think there was some risk-taking involved, like a kid stamping his way through a newly formed puddle of rain—or maybe Gene Kelly “singing in the rain,” but instead it was Matt Lamb “sifting through the drip!”

It was just great.  I believe it’s going to teach me that there are other adventures that the drip is going to take me to.I’m like a kid with a new toy—I can’t wait to see how I can pull its arms and legs off!

Onward and upward,
Signed,
The MadMan, Drip-and-color-loving Idiot Sometimes called Artist!