Nesting and other Studio Maintenance

Part of an artist's psyche is 'puttering'. Not to be confused with procrastination. Nope. This is any activity that is remotely art or creativity related...even cleaning and organizing your studio space. Consider these activities 'brain play'...nesting...or a method of switching from left brain mode to creative right brain mode. As my friend and mentor, Charles Reid, said when asked why he makes squiggles with his pencil when doing a contour drawing, "I guess I'm just running in place while I decide which direction to go next."

The day before I flew out on my last greatest adventure to France, I took down my paintings from the Julie Wait Gallery. Barely had time to get them out of the car and stacked up in the floor before a whirlwind packing. When I got home, I had to deal with them! Our nephew, Josh spent a few days with us and in addition to 'sitting' for a painting...figured out that the 30 or so paintings in the upstairs floor were beginning to wear on me. Besides the fact that the frames needed to be up for safekeeping. Anyway, he suggested we move them down to the studio. I balked. Big Time! Because then they would just be down there, stacked up in the floor against the wall.

He persisted (I trained him too well), and when I grudgingly agreed, announced that every painting on the wall had to be removed, every painting grouped, and re-hung. Four hours later, almost every painting (except some that should never have been framed) was hanging neatly on the wall!

This week I finished up a baby (well, a 9 month project anyway)! I'm 99% finished and happy with the programming I did, all the pages work as planned, and BFF Dustie linked my site to hers. I've been earning 18 cents a day! Whoo-hoo! Up to $7.26. She is the one who FORCED me to do my clip art site (www.clickartclip.com) (grin)...it is designed around free (little-bitty) pieces of art and photos. If someone needs a larger size for print purposes, they are available for sale. The entire thing is designed around Google ads. And hundreds or thousands of page views. My site has been complete (with around 200 different clips) just this week...with the in-progress pages live for a couple of months and this week, I've logged around 4,000 hits (web language for people who look at the site).

Next week...THE newly organized STUDIO and PAINTING! Left brain will be put in storage for awhile!