This work was painted in oil on canvas. It depicts a dancer creating space by taking a step. I shared this painting on Steemit 5 years ago but most of the images from that era have disappeared.
Today was a day off and I did very little. I finished an article for an online magazine and started thinking about my next painting but that's about it. There's an old canvas sitting on my easel that I've been meaning to paint over. The issue I'm having is that this canvas is maybe 10 inches wide by 30 inches tall and all my ideas for it seem stupid.
I do have another canvas of a more normal size ready to go. Without a clear vision for what to paint on it I'm hesitant to start laying paint down. Maybe I should just start and see what happens. But I don't want to waste materials due to their high cost.
Part of my hesitation stems from the fact that there's simply no room in my house for more art due to the remodeling that's recently taken place here. All available wall space is occupied and I have a growing stack of un-hung paintings with nowhere to go. I've given away all that I can and even have friends storing some of my art. So when I think about making a new painting, the thought is accompanied by the fear that there'll be no place in the world for it.
This is a weird problem to have as an artist. It's harder to solve than the problem of what color to use or how much visual noise to add to a piece. One workaround is to paint on specialized paper. I've done many paintings on Arches oil paper and they look great framed. But the last time I went to the art store I discovered that they no longer sold Arches oil paper.
Instead, they had Strathmore oil paper, which I've never tried. It's smaller than the Arches and only about half as thick. The texture seems good, finer than Arches, but I'm concerned about absorbency. Paint totally sticks to the Arches paper while the Strathmore paper I got seems like it might absorb less pigment. And then there's the question of how well it'll accept masked edges without peeling when the tape comes off.
The only real way to answer these questions is by experimentation, of course. And I'm sure I'll get around to that soon. But for right now, all I really want to do is paint on a good sized regular canvas. So I'll probably do that and leave the new paper for another day.
