I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
I haven’t been painting very much over the last few months, mainly due to medical reasons. I started on Wellbutrin in February, to get a handle on my eating and weight, and that changed the way I felt about a lot of things. I broke up with the guy I had been seeing for nine months, all but stopped drinking coffee, got back to low carb intermittent fasting, and had no motivation to paint. I also had two surgeries — a hysterectomy in April and retinal surgery in June.
A couple weeks ago I decided that I had achieved my goal with Wellbutrin and tapered off of it. I had lost 20 pounds and changed my eating habits back to where they had been before I started dating Ray.
Having gotten off Wellbutrin, I find my motivation for making art coming back. Yay!
I have an artwork in the WCACO member show at the NKollectiv Gallery in Englewood right now, and I attended the exhibitions committee zoom call last week. I’m working on a kind of sculptural piece made out of books for the upcoming (Un)Altered Books: Unheard Voices show. I have my eye on a couple other calls for entry that are encouraging submission of abstract art pieces.
But my studio isn’t in great shape, so I’m fixing it up.
I like to hang my stretched canvases on a wall for painting. I’ve thought of purchasing an easel like this one but I don’t want to spend the money and people complain that they are hard to assemble. I’m pretty handy with stuff like that, but given my general handiness, why not figure out a better system for hanging the canvases on my wall?
I have been using a couple nails to hold canvases on the wall. Works alright, but the nails didn’t stay secure in the wall because I hadn’t put them in studs, and they weren’t very long.
I had a plastic tarp on the wall to protect it, hung up with a combo of nails and tape. This wasn’t secure. It kept falling down.
So I’m investigating how to improve upon this setup which has worked generally pretty well for me. I’ve had numerous conversations with ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude about what to do, and I have a few ideas, but I need to experiment. That’s my big task for today.
Feels good to be making art again.