The Artist, behind the scenes

I'm getting ready to show several paintings in two exhibits scheduled for the month of January.  For the Independent Painters Exhibition at the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center, Bloomfield Hills MI, I am scheduled to show three portrait pieces, since that is what we work on in our painting sessions. In the display at the Royal Oak Public Library I plan to show a few of my Southwest themed paintings, so it will be a cohesive body of work shown in an area of limited space. Having a week off from teaching, I'm trying to get ahead on a few things. Tonight I've been spending time painting the edges of a couple of my paintings on canvas black. I still have a couple of paintings to go. It's a time consuming process, especially since you can't paint all the edges at once, having to avoid setting the piece down on a freshly painted side, or one that's not completely dried. On the collage pieces, when I tape along the edge of the front face (to help keep the black sides from extending onto the front image), I have to be particularly careful to peel the tape off gingerly to avoid tearing the papers and boards I've applied to the canvas for the collage.

When I've finished all this in the next couple of days and evenings, the next task will be applying picture hangers (D-rings) to the back of the wood stretcher bars, or to the frames of those that need to be framed (still another task), hopefully only one or two, which I'll have to order frames for in the next few weeks. If I sound weary, it's only because I am! Painting in itself is invigorating and full of amazing moments. Preparing those items for exhibition is a whole other thing. Meanwhile, I've been working on an unfinished painting from the past, another portrait from class, that's been waiting for me for months, because I feel it has potential to emerge as something good. I hope in the next several days to be able to post that work as it comes together.