Very much a non-painting day today. I pretended to be William Wegman; Fang pretended he was a Weimaraner.

I explain the current work to Fang in depth.

I point out this painting as example.

Fang asks me some questions about my process. I patiently listen as he asks me what brand paint I use.

I went for a morning run. So far so good on that. Since I injured my knee due to over-training the first go round, I'm at the beginner level all over again. 1.7 miles every other day and will increase slowly until I'm back to 3-mile runs. I started a running blog about the same time as I began this blog. I deleted it after I quit training for the marathon due to the knee injury. It mocked me, sitting there day after day with no updated posts. If anyone knows how to retrieve a deleted blog from 4 years ago, let me know, I googled it and all I got was an archive of sorts. One entry tells me that I cross trained after the injury for 1 hour and 55 minutes. What kind of masochist was I?

After the run, I showered and put on a dress to meet a friend for an impromptu coffee but I was running so late that I had to cancel. I didn't want to take off the dress though, so that left me to work on the computer on stuff like banking, syllabus update, writing and other nonsense like the photo essay above.

I'm now waiting for a woman who wants to buy my Tracer projector from me. Like I ever was going to trace an image and paint. I think I almost used it once.

Drifting

I did not intend to let a whole week go by w/o posting but was not in studio last week except to pretend to clean, replace 4 light bulbs, take one painting further into mud and make aimless strokes on another. Hardly worth posting about. Working in oil is taxing for me right now. I feel like some indolent kid who just wants to make half-ass brush strokes going nowhere- which would be fine if I could conceptually acquiesce to that as a strategy, but apparently I can't. 

I've got the heater on and in about 5 minutes am going to force myself to work on some watercolors I started last year.  Have thought about moving the watercolor station inside the house during the next couple of months so that I can be warm and cozy and cocoon-like. Yes, I believe I will. 

Really, I'm sitting on my ass now, not doing a thing.

And although I'm missing a couple of openings, I'm enjoying being relatively otiose.

Today was the last day of the semester. I didn't really put 2 and 2 together until last week, but because I was teaching on Saturdays this semester, I decided that my studio days would be M,T,W,R, and F. I can't say I was performing at 100% capacity in the studio for 40 hours every week, but I showed up 5 days a week for the last 16 weeks and got work done. The 2 + 2, well, duh factor is that last week, I hit my threshold. I heard someone say TGIF and I realized that for 16 weeks I was attempting to work a 35-40-hour week in the studio in addition to teaching on Saturdays. Only Sunday was designated as my official day of inactive nothingdom. Hence, a slight low-grade feeling of all work and no play. And on top of that, I'm also thinking that because I'm working on smaller canvases right now, I'm running through a lot of ideas at a faster clip than when I work on large canvases. It's that 'I'm a factory mentality' again.

Anyway, I'm inert now, save for knitting my tweed skirt, and next semester I'm taking Mondays off.