I finally am getting a handle on this book of drawings. Carol Es une Monographie de Lignes is going to have 60 drawings in it and I have finished many of them. I have 23 more to go and I don’t know what a handful of them are going to look like yet, but that is part of the fun!

What I really want is to just get back to painting. All I have been doing is thinking about painting and I haven’t painted in so very long. Drawing is important and I see how very important it truly is. It’s something that needs to be a daily practice if you want to be a painter. If you want to be an artist. If you want to communicate visually on a consistent basis. It exercises that part of your brain and makes it like a muscle that works itself out. You become Hercules! Lifting giant boulders gets to be really easy – but you’re going to get super bored if there are no boulders for you to easily lift!

Get me in the studio for Christ sake! For the sake of the baby Jesus, or for the sake of my sanity. I have never even met the baby Jesus, but I have met my bad brains, so just get me in there already!

A couple things I started – eons ago…

I started it at the same time I started the little one that I finished very recently – the one that I just posted in my last blog post. All I did with that one though, was added a spot color of turquoise, and it was done! I didn’t expect it to just happen like that, but that was all it needed. It was hard for me to walk away from it at that point too, but I did.

This one above, I have simple plans for as well, but not as simple as the last one.

Then, I have been thinking a LOT about my older work. I mean, not that old, but my work with all the patterns in them. The pattern paintings. And you know I stopped making any paintings with patterns in them this last year (don’t know if you noticed) because I thought I “should.” But between you and me, I actually have quite a lot of fun with that process! I have loved collage from as far back as I can remember.

I think I thought that I would not be evolving unless I gave it all up and just used paint, and nothing else for a while. Which I think I did. I have. But lately I have had an itch I need to scratch. I want to incorporate what I have been doing: the drawing, the painting, the simplicity, the new ideas – and bring it into the pattern painting process and see what happens.

I posted this piece as a Work-in-Progress on WetCanvas a couple days ago…

and someone said there was a foreboding feeling about it, which was very interesting.

I said, “this is actually a painting from 2004 or 2005 (I’d have to look it up because I signed it in the Hebrew year at the time.) It was part of a vertical triptych that I grew to dislike very much, so I decided to wreck it by breaking it up (recently) and I turned the middle piece (called Bulletproof) upside down and started painting the black arc lines. 

Some of you guys got me thinking, as well as some others, and MYSELF, about my older work with the patterns. I felt like I HAD to give it all up or I wouldn’t be evolving, but maybe that’s not the case after all. Maybe I can incorporate it still and take it to another level. So it’s been on my mind. 

So with this one, I feel like I was just playing around. I will finish it at some point, maybe before the new year. I hope. 

The arc was like an entrance to something else – a new place, but still, a dark place. Or at least not a “funny” place. A serious place.”

But… I don’t know what the hell I am saying. All I know is that I’m just feeling a bit overwhelmed lately not being able to finish anything in particular. My list of things to do just goes on and on and on with no feeling of accomplishment in sight. Well — it’s in sight, but not for a while and I’m an impatient nut when it comes to finishing the task at hand.

I hope to finish the drawings for the book sometime in January.

I’d like to cut away from those book drawings and paint for a week straight the week of Xmas.

All I wanna do is spend some time in the studio. I wanna hug that easel of mine and welcome myself back into the fold.