Not only did it look like a grey day today, it very much felt like one. I was in the studio fairly early this morning to find the painting that I had last checked on monday still as wet as I had left it Monday afternoon. It is bitterly cold at the moment so it is understandable. I was hoping that the painting would be touch dry by this weekend in order for me to enter it into the Derby open competition. But sadly there isn't any chance of that happening. I do have other work I can submit but I had set my heart on this piece, I was really excited by it. Never mind, I should have been more organised and started the painting a few weeks earlier, but who knows, maybe without the urgency and spontaneity the painting would have looked totally different.
I then spent the next 4 hours cleaning the edge of paintings and painting them a uniform colour, then affixing mirror plates onto some work and then cleaning up all my brushes that had been soaking in cleaner since the weekend. I had managed to use about 30 brushes over the weekend. We had an open studio on Fri/Sat/Sun and I carried on painting throughout but rather than cleaning the brushes as I went I kept using new ones until I ran out. I didn't want to be bothered with cleaning whilst people were coming around. I paid the price today as it took me ages.
So in the 4 hours that I was in the studio today I didn't manage to get anything creative done. I suppose we have to have days like this to enable us to have days of making but it is sooo tedious. I wish that I could afford to have someone clean my stuff for me, maybe I could apply to the arts council for funding for a personal brush cleaner, might be worth a try.
