Finding Buried Treasure in Unintended Consequences

(Note to all you wonderful readers - if you are feeling a sense of deja vu, you're right - this post ran last month.  I'm rerunning it as part of Seth Apter's "Buried Treasure" blog project in which participants choose a favorite blog post to republish.  As soon as I have the official link to all the participating blogs from Seth, I will post it here, and on my Facebook page.  In the meantime, here's the link to the post explaining the project.  Now without further ado - DEJA VU!)

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On Saturday morning, I had some time before leaving for my afternoon shift at the Pawtucket Art Collaborative's Mill Gallery - I'm a volunteer there.  And what better way to spend time than to create something?

I had been dithering over what to do for the next installment of the Art Challenge - this week's assignment was Favorite Colors.  I have a lot of favorite colors, but I decided to make this piece with pink.  

One thing I tend to do is when I think of a project I get obsessed with it and make far too many things to go into that project.  Case in point my continuing interest in geometric shapes (which isn't obvious from the work that I do).  Sometime back I had punched and cut out tons of geometric shapes in a variety of colors and patterns which have just sat there.  So, I decided, why not look for pink shapes?

I came up with a bunch of pink squares, which became the raw material.  During my Friday gallery shift, I sorted the squares, chose what I wanted to use, and decided on a pattern.

apologies for the photo

In the meantime I had been pondering the best background.  After some research, I decided to use a grayish background.

the palette I decided upon

Ready for action Saturday morning, I chose a silver paint to start with and mixed in pink to see what I got.  It was rather light so I added some neutral gray paint (this was all acrylic).  I liked the result and painted a canvas board in that shade. 

The result
 (I use FedEx & USPS shipping envelopes to protect my table BTW)

Just after I finished mixing the paint, I had a visit from one of my studio assistants who wanted to check out what I'd been doing instead of playing with him.  Fortunately he decided to leave before getting into the paint.

Junior

Unfortunately I can't show you the lovely paint job I did on the canvas board.  Yet.

I had a little bit of what I'd mixed left over, and decided to add more gray paint, then some black.  I discovered I didn't have an open tube of black paint, so I opened one.  The hole was rather small, so I squeezed the tube a little harder.

Can you guess what happened next?

spots on ceiling

Yes, paint everywhere.  Ceiling.  Bedspread.  Me.  Floor.  Not as widespread as it could have been though.  And I had about 90 minutes to try to clean things up.

Black paint also splattered a bit of the nice silver/pink/gray canvas I'd painted.  I tried to fix it but there are still streaks, so it needed to be repainted.  Later.  First I had to shower - AGAIN - because there was paint in my hair, on my arms, and on my face. 

One decision to make is to not try to accomplish something complicated in a short time.

But the real lesson learned Saturday morning was -- put a larger hole in the paint tube's opening next time.

I'll tell you what happened with the piece for the art challenge in my next post.  And, yes, I'll have to do something about that ceiling.

Later
lin