I’m having so much fun, y’all!! As we get closer and closer to opening the tattoo studio, I’ve been getting to make paintings to decorate the lobby. Big paintings. In different styles. Of random stuff. Stuff I don’t normally get to paint. This is soooooooo exciting for an artist.

As I’ve talked about before, I’m a very restless artist. I get bored doing the same style or subject matter for too long. But that’s what gallery owners and critics demand. You have to get known for one thing and just that one thing. And then you can very slowly evolve to get known for one more thing. But you have to do painting after painting in each theme/style. And partly, that’s good, because it means you get really good at that one thing. But, if you’re anything like me, you get bored.

As I’ve also talked about before, I have no more room to store large paintings. So I’ve mostly switched to small canvases. And that can be fun, because painting can go very quickly and you don’t have to wait long for the gratification of a finished painting. But I really like the physicality of working on large canvases. It allows me to get emotion out of myself and onto the canvas, regardless of the subject matter. It just feels good while you’re painting. And when you’re done, you’ve created something substantial. It announces to the world that it needs to exist.

So combining working in a range of styles and subject matter with working on large canvases is making me a very happy camper. I’ve also taken some older paintings that I wasn’t in love with and painted over them, which has the bonus win of freeing up that storage space the old painting was taking up.

So over the next few days, I’m going to post some images of the paintings I’ve been doing. I’ve had a hard time photographing everything because our weather has been so wonky (rainy or too windy or too cloudly or too sunny) and I have to shoot the images outside, but I’ll post them as I’m able. Here’s the first. See below it for an explanation:

Rouen In the Rain 64″ x 36″ oil on linen

Merchandise and prints here, and here. When I took that Viking River Cruise down the Seine last year, my favorite stop was Rouen. I used some pics I’d taken of one street as inspiration for this painting. Here’s the pic I took, and then a little watercolor I did on the trip of that street.