You may have noticed I’ve been a little…lax about posting this last week or so. Well, there’s good reasons.
Ch-cha-cha-anges are a brewin’.
Oh my sweetums, SO MANY good things happening in Arty Life land these days! Good things! Uber good, super good absolutely freakin’ AWESOME good things!!!
This is the week ALL the construction loose ends get wrapped up in the new! improved! Studio Grande! At least the interior. The part I need to be finished so I can move in and make it my work place home.
I am SO excited!
But to get there we’re going through the storm before the calm. Oh indeed we are. You cannot walk anywhere in the house without seeing the chaos that will morph into studio orderliness.
This is what the living room looks like right now. Imagine those drawers in the studio. Loaded with art supplies in an ORDERLY manner. Sigh… I can’t wait.
I even bought drawer organizers.
I don’t have to wait much longer. This is Mr. Spouse doing manly things involving the soon to be major suck exhaust fan. The fan that will be my best friend when it comes to stinky art stuff.
The slate that will be the windowsills and firesafe back splash for encaustic land. Because building the studio is Mr. Spouse’s project. His art. And I’m not complaining. And the tiles will be beautiful splashed with beeswax, don’t you think?
While all these changes are going on in studio land, changes are going on with Arty Life too.
Oh. My. YES!!!
I’m in the process of adding a store and lots of art. You can see the progress on that if you click ‘latest art’ up on the nav bar. Still figuring some details like shipping and the boring behind the scenes stuff so it will be a couple of weeks before it’s operational. And I’ll be adding prints as well.
There will be price points for every budget.
Including FREE!
Yep, I’m going to add some freebies for download!
And that’s not all…oh no, my sweetums, not hardly…I have a BIG surprise!!!. Yes. I. Do. But like all surprises, I CAN’T TELL YOU. Not now. You have to wait.
So to do all that, I’m taking the next week off. Off from posting, that is. I’m going to be working my tail off. Finishing the studio. Moving in. And making some MAGIC happen here in Arty Life Land. Like I said, SURPRISES!!!
So come back Monday after next (July 9) and check it all out.
Mr. Spouse likes to play in mud. Big boy mud. Concrete. He has his own mixer. Actually, it’s his second one, the first having gone belly up a few years back. Because he used it that much. Seriously. One concrete marvel after another.
But until this weekend he never got to realize his big dream…countertops.
It was the one thing he was adamant about when he offered to build the new studio. I agreed, as long as he understood it’s a working art studio. His countertops will not be precious. They will be used. Most likely abused.
He was okay with that.
First he built the forms on the base cabinets. The lower section is my office area. Computer, scanner, printer, stare out the window at the squirrels office area.
Saturday morning we got up bright and early. Too early for me since I’d only gone to bed a few hours before.
My job was to mix the color into the dry cement. I don’t remember how many buckets I mixed. I do remember grasping the stir stick in both hands and feeling like a witch hovering over her cauldron. My lower back remembers it too.
I had black concrete dust in all my pores. On my clothes. Under my clothes. But not in my lungs because I wore a mask. Which in the end was the only part of my face that remained clean.
The first plops buckets of wet concrete hit the forms.
First layer gets troweled.
Then covered with a sheet of steel mesh before layer number 2. The edge is reinforced with rebar. You’ll have to trust me on this.
Lots of troweling. Lots of waiting. This is Mr. Bobby, our concrete friend, with his handy-dandy concrete vibrator. This excited the concrete and allowed Mr. Bobby to have his way with it. ‘Nuf said about that.
By late afternoon it was looking good. Starting to firm up. Forms were popped. Edges repaired. More troweling. Mr. Bobby and Mr. Spouse were both adamant that I NOT scribe into the oh so tempting, oh so succulent, oh so WILLING countertops in process.
So I decided I had better things to do. I headed down to the old studio to photograph art. I’m setting up an e-commerce site and need better photos.
Sunday Update
Show and tell!
Yee-haw and Yowser! Doin’ the happy studio dance, oh yes I am! Because Mr. Spouse is a handy man indeed. The weekend construction man super hero!
And in a couple of days we’ll be coming up on our 30th anniversary. The traditional gift for 30 years is pearls. The modern gift, diamonds. In our family it’s looking like concrete. And that’s okay with me!
Arty Life is moving at warp speed these days. Got a new studio to finish. Estimated move in date, three weeks.
Mr. Spouse, AKA Weekend Construction Warrior, assures me I will be in by July 8th. He has yet to tell me the hour or the minute but I have no doubt about his intentions. If he says by the 8th, he means by the 8th.
He is often mistaken for an engineer.
So here’s where we stand as of this weekend. Got electric. YAY! Cabinets are in, forms are made for the concrete countertops. They’ll be poured next Saturday. I will be mixing the color. Black. Mr. Spouse trusts me to do this. He says they won’t be black, more charcoal. It doesn’t matter what color they are once the paint comes out.
The lower section in the photo is my office area. Computer, printer, scanner. You have to pretend you see them, just like you see the countertops.
I’ve been working behind the scenes. Building cabinet drawers. There’s a few of them posing with the box from the exhaust fan. Buddying up because soon they’ll be at opposite ends of the studio. Drawers in the office, holding pens and files. Tape. Clips. Rubber bands. Chocolate.
Mr. Exhaust fan will reside against the real wall, heroically sucking up toxic art fumes. I do so adore him.
Then there’s the easel, seen up above with cabinet parts. The reviews all said it’s a great easel but a bi-atch to put together. Sounds like migraine level on the fun-o-meter to me. So I’ve been putting it off until I get a better attitude or the night before the move. Whichever comes first.
More behind the scenes, this time warp speed snail version. I’m restructuring my official art site, the one I never direct anyone to because it was thrown together last fall right before my show. The work doesn’t represent any of the new things I’ve been doing since then. I hadn’t realized how much I’ve done until I began organizing the photos for the galleries.
Not just any galleries. I’m taking it to the next level with an on-line store. Right now it’s limited to originals but prints will follow after I get set up in the new studio. This is where we get into the speed of slow. I’ve been pulling out my hair all day figuring out the ‘intuitive’ e-commerce plugin.
Intuitive for a code junkie, maybe.
But I tend to operate on the right side of my brain.
Ah, I’ll figure it out. I. WILL.
Because I’m too stubborn not to.
Okay, my sweetums…time for me to end this fascinating (WAKE UP!) one sided discussion and go back to e-commerce land. Wishing you all sweet dreams and productive days. One of us got to have ’em.
Or what goes on inside that head of yours, Miz Susan? Really, WHAT???
Okay, so last week I got all fired up about Venus traipsing merrily across the sun. Because someone told me that astrology-wise it meant ALL SORTS OF CREATIVE WOO-WOO.
Whoo-hoo, I’m all for that, y’know.
So I went home and painted. Might’ve even showed you this. See, lookit…she’s in front of the sun! Because she’s Venus!
Oh, I was nothing if not clever, eh?
But in the clear light of another day, a day when my mind was stone cold sober and free from the effects of the astrological high…well, then I wasn’t nearly as impressed with my efforts. In fact, after some careful (i.e., spontaneous) consideration… I MADE HER GO AWAY!
Poof...just like that!
Be gone with you, pouty faced goddess!
Which is what happens when you arm a cranky artist with a loaded brush. Wasn’t exactly poof. First came the tortured hippy phase.
Next came death by Titan Buff. Followed by some scrubbing. Good way to get the mouldering in the grave effect, don’t you agree?
Then I said the hell with it and brought out my inner Flora Bowley. Because layers are good. A new start. Did a lot of layers, can’t say how many. By this time I was in a pissy mood perilously close to art therapy.
I looked at the scribbles and saw a woman. Not really, didn’t see a damn thing…but I still had Venus in my head. And if I wasn’t careful, if I didn’t part with Flora (whom I respect and admire tremendously) if I didn’t part with her right here, I would go on to paint some birds. And big ole va-jayjay flowers. Wouldn’t’ve been able to help myself.
So I cranked up the music and painted a GODDESS. And those blue squiggles on the lower left…they told me they were dancers. Holy crap! The Supremes!
No, no NO…not the Supremes…it’s the TRANSITS! Venus and the Transits!
'Venus and the Transits Rockin' Round the Sun' by Susan Lobb-Porter
And there you have it…Venus and the Transits Rockin’ Round the Sun.
PAR-TAY TIME!
I never say a painting’s finished until it leaves the studio. But this one’s close. Maybe a few little touches here and there. But no major facelift like she-who- lies-beneath-the-surface.
Now scroll back up and listen to Frankie. C’mon, you know you want to.
Sheetrock’s up. Taped and textured. Next step is priming. And then painting. First I have to pick the paint. White. But which one? There may be fifty shades of gray but there are approximately fifty thousand hundred million Shades Of. WHITE!!!
AAACK!
But the door will be painted red. Red I can do.
This view is from the door. Cabinets will run the length of both walls under the windows. We’re picking them up at Ikea this Saturday.By Monday they’ll be built and in place, waiting for the concrete counters that Mr. Spouse will pour the following week.
Cross your fingers, girls and boys…the counters WILL be poured next week! Yes. They. Will.
Going to put a vent fan on the back wall between the two windows. That will be where I do encaustics and spray stinky stuff.
Another view of the wall o’windows. I just love this wall.
And a view from the encaustic area towards the front.
Still have to take the tarps off the skylights.
Still have to do a lot of things. But we’re getting closer. And I’m thinkingknowing my art is going to blossom in here!
Oh. My. So many adventures in Arty Life land the last couple of days. Brace yourself because this post is going to be skipping from one thing to the next, each topic guaranteed to make you more dizzy than the next.
First…and only because it happened minutes ago and I’m still as jumpy as a tweaker from the adrenalin rush…my brush with wildlife. There was a bear rat in the hay shed. Big sucker. But I was BRAVE. Oh, indeed I was, even with flip flops on my feet. No girly screaming like I did with the mouse. No. This time I was brave enough to stomp and shout with a very big voice like a very scary person. And bang a couple metal trash lids together like a one woman marching band. And Mr. Rat was so impressed he fell off one shelf and jumped down from another. The last I saw was his bare naked tail as it disappeared behind the hay.
Begone with you Templeton!
Now that I’ve impressed you with my wildlife management skills…you ARE impressed, aren’t you…now we can move on to Precious Man Dog (AKA Bean, AKA Benny) If you read Friday’s post, you’ll recall PMD was sorely in need of a haircut. Being a poodle mix the hair just grows. And grows. I let it grow over the winter to keep him warm. Dreadlocks happen and matts and clumps of thick, dense felt take over. Then in the spring I take to him with scissors and we start the cycle all over again.
So this was PMD last week.
This is him today, half the size he used to be. But so darn cute I can’t stand it.
Sophie is in the middle of her spring trim. I have to wait until she’s dead asleep before I can get certain spots. Like her chest. Right now she’s sporting a whole lot of chest hair. Throw a couple gold chains around her neck and she’d be a ringer for Burt Reynolds.
Okay, now it’s time to move on from critters, both wild and domestic, and get to art. Got a couple works in progress to show.
This is acrylic, 2’x2′. Don’t have a clue where it’s going but will know when it gets there. Layers and scribbles. Layers and scribbles.
This one is also acrylic, 36″x48″. Still very much a work in progress. Oh crap…as I’m writing this I’m wondering if I put the lid back on the jar of Titan Buff…well, let’s hope I did because it’s dark and I’m not heading back down to Studio Grande.
Speaking of Studio Grande, Mr. Spouse got some sheet rock up in the new! improved! Studio-Grande-to-be.
He was hoping to have it all rocked this weekend but it was slow going. Hard work indeed. But this is how Mr. Spouse relaxes from his desk job, he builds stuff. And I’m not complaining. By the way, this photo was taken after 6PM. Still good natural light, at least at this time of year. Even more when the tarps come off the skylights.
A gentle reminder that Wednesday is Random Acts of Art. I hope some of you will join me in sharing where you hide your treasures. You can send me photos before Tuesday (like, today) and I’ll post them on the blog. Or you can post the link to your own blog anytime between Wednesday and Saturday.
I’m posting art every day on my FaceBook page. Pop on over and check it out. And while you’re there, do me a GREAT BIG HUMONGOUS favor and click the ‘like’ button (for the page) if you haven’t done so already. And if you’ve already liked my page, pat yourself on the back because you are my BFF and I love you…truly love you… almost as much as I love chocolate!
