Oh, Hi!
Oh, hello there! Welcome to my little corner of the internet.
What follows is a brief history of how I came to do what I do.
I’ve been painting since I was about 10 using acrylic tole paints that my Nana used on wooden cut-outs.
Painting and I had a little break up from my early twenties until my mid-thirties. Almost two and a half years ago I took a “sampler” oil class at Swinton’s Art Supplies. It’s a three-hour class where you show up without supplies or projects and they introduce you to the medium in a very broad, basic way to see if you click. Like speed dating, actually. I figured it was the cheapest way for me to suss out if oil paints and I were still compatible, friendly even.
We clicked.
So, I reinvested and started painting again in a casual way, in my basement (where there’s a lightbulb and only one outlet) and I could only paint at high noon on a weekend.
I bought a Gamblin medium sample pack so see what I liked using. I had only used turp and linseed oil “in my youth” and there were all these new fancy mediums! In it, there was a pot of cold wax medium. I’d also never used a palette knife before, but I’d bought one because I was told I should mix colours using a palette knife instead of my brush. (Umm….I don’t…I’ll just buy a new brush thank you). So I put the two together to see what happened. And that’s how my abstract cold wax addiction started; I was doomed basically by a free sample.
Finally, a few months later, my mom came to visit. I had remembered painting watercolour in high school because it was enforced for a well-balanced curriculum much to the dismay of every artist who loved full-bodied paint. The experience and resulting paintings were so truly awful. I hate being bad at things, and also I was curious why it was so awful. So, I signed my mom and myself up for another sampler class since we were both interested and we had a fabulous time. It was quite shocking really!
Traditional oil painting. Cold Wax Abstracts. Watercolour. Is it too many different things? Absolutely, yes. But I’m not yet willing to let anyone go just yet.
