Rework and Recycle

This has been an extremely busy week. There has been little time for painting. Getting our house ready to sell seems to be consuming all of my time and energy. The hope is that it will all pay off. Here in Michigan that is all very iffy. The economy here really sucks. Even as the rest of the country shows some improvement, Michigan still lags behind. A friend of mine just sold her home. It was a very nice Arts and Crafts style house. It took her 6 months to sell it and that is considered good for this area. We are told to plan on having our house on the market for about 18 months at a minimum.

So, I’ve been taking care of all these little projects that I’ve been putting off for awhile. My wife also has a Moving Sale planned for Thursday through Saturday. This sale will be a weekly thing until…whenever. I will be so glad when everything is done and we can just pack what’s left and get on with the next (and probably last) phase of our lives.

All of this means that I’ve got to go through my studio and clean it out. Easier said than done. One of the negative aspects of my OCD is that I am somewhat of a pack rat. If it weren’t for things like moving I might just accumulate things until there was no room left. So I am going through old paintings to see what is worth saving. If I don’t like the image at least the materials, like the support, might be worth saving. When I was in college we were taught to be scrounges. Materials were expensive and our budgets were very limited. That idea (ideal?) has always stayed with me.


So, I found a painting that I wasn’t really thrilled with. There were certain parts that were okay and there were certain parts that I just didn’t care for. I cropped it down and started to repaint it. The final result has more of the feeling of my pastels and that is what I was after. With the oil pastels there is much more of a drawing quality that I like. So much of that gets lost when I translate it into oils.