Announcement

I've been concentrating more on my new wordpress blog in recent weeks. At the moment that one is easier for me to access, even though it seems more difficult to use than this one. As I've said before something has changed. I can only access the dashboard of this blog and not the actual blog pages. As a result I can't even add comments or reply to comments.

Most of my posting to the blog is done via a work computer and either blogger have made some changes or the work IT system has been changed. Access to most blogs found on blogger has been blocked, the automated reason given is something called "placeholders". I don't have a clue what that means.

This also means that I can't view other blogs with a blogspot address, so unfortunately, if you have a blog on that system I can't access your blog either. I therefore haven't been able to read some of my favourite blogs for some time.

I'll keep this blog going and will make an occasional entry like this one, but unless the situation changes I'll be posting most things on wordpress from now on. This is the link to that blog:

http://onesimusfiles.wordpress.com/

This "announcement" will also be posted onto my other blogspot sites

2012

I’ve clearly done very little blogging in recent months, see here for a brief and partial explanation.

http://onefiles.blogspot.com/2012/03/2012-first-months.html

Pierced

http://onesimusfiles.wordpress.com/2012/03/06/96/

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Studio and Painting in Progress

We have cleaned out the end of the garage and have turned it into a "studio", This photo is an overview (featuring the front of my car in the foreground).

This photo is a close up of a workbench that I'm currently using.

This is the latest stage of a painting in progress. An earlier stage is illustrated in the previous post.

Flimsy and unstable, but cheap.

During the Christmas/New Year Break I made a start on the biggest painting I’ve attempted. Until now I’ve used small canvases and canvas boards. At times I felt restricted by the size of the canvas which tended to make me strive for more “neatness” and cleanness than I felt capable of achieving.
As a trial I bought some large, cheap cardboard sheets and moved my “studio” away from the dining table to the garage floor.

This trial has probably been inspired to a degree by the work of Ian Fairweather, a recently discovered favourite of mine, who painted on some very flimsy and unstable materials. If it was good enough for him, and the galleries who bought his work – surely cardboard is a good enough medium for a beginner’s trial and error attempts to learn how to paint.

So far I’ve enjoyed the exercise and see its value. It has allowed me a greater freedom at little cost and I haven’t felt the restraint of trying to fit a big idea into a little space. I’ve also felt less need for neatness. Smudges, inconsistencies and crooked lines don’t seem to matter so much on the larger surface. So far the only drawback has been the cardboard’s desire to curl due to the wetness of the paint and, I assume, the atmospheric humidity.

The work in progress is looking very rough, but it is showing me the possibilities and giving me the confidence to invest in more suitable, yet more expensive, materials to create something with more permanence. I can also see the possibility of experimenting with ways of improving the weaknesses of what I’ve done so far, and because the cost has been minimal, I don’t have so much pressure to get it right.