SANDY GARNETT ART BLOG

This week I finished a portrait, I am trying to finish another today, and I am continuing the finishing of my basement space.  I will do before after of the basement space this week.  I priced out lights and ouch I’m looking at 3 grand, but this will really make the space sing.  It’s modest space mind you, but I’m outfitting it so that it reads clean and professional for serious collectors.  I will have seven or eight nicely lit walls to hang select works.  Most importantly I will have a really nice environment to work in that satisfies a number of roles I play; workshop guy, craftsman, sculptor, painter, archivist, graphic designer, and so on.  I am carving my one big space into five working areas.  I’m getting closer.  Thanks for your patience - I am due for some pics this week on the blog.

Here is my first painting in the new painting studio area, a nice little 30x40 Friday romp.  I’ve been wanting to paint, and I recently had my head buried in the Musicians work from 1998.  This one felt good… quick, fresh, friendly and an interesting picture to me.  The below painting is acrylic, measures 30x40 inches and I will take 3000. USD for it.

I spent the week with my assistant making the walls pictured in my CT studio.  I closed a ceiling that was cool and 9ft tall, but like the rest of the space there was so much action, so many pipes and electric lines, that my eyes would wander all over the place and have trouble settling on the painting at hand.  So I walled off a painting area.  Through the gap in the photo is a 7ft deep entrance way where I am putting all my tools, where the door is, where the windows are.  Behind the camera lense I’ve  got another 500 square feet of office, inventory, shooting art area, bathroom and so on.  I will build sliding doors that cover both openings of the painting area when I want isolation. 

 I talked to my mother yesterday, who thinks I spend too much time and money on space.  She hasn’t sold 1.3 million in art so she thinks my space work is often a waste of time.  If I am comfortable in a space I can pump out more work.  The above exercise is intending to eliminate distraction, so I can sit in an insulated cocoon and contemplate one work at a time, clean walls, mint lighting, nothing else to occupy my mind.  This environment helps me to unfold the canvases in my mind.  People don’t realize that I’m running a small business and owning several small properties and making art for a living representing myself.  This painting pocket will be a gentle push, goad me in the right direction.  The thing is with the proper inspiration I can bang out a battery of five thousand dollar paintings in said space, if and when the mood strikes me.  If I were more of a known quantity, or represented by a name dealer, that 5 would be 20 or 30.  The ceiling in this space is nuts, the visual information deafening.  I ought to have displayed a before and after.  When the space was all open I would think about everything I saw in the 850 square foot space and struggle to focus on the easel.  With nothing but blank walls and one canvas my struggle to focus is eliminated.  As with many moves I make, this one was long in the making.  I spent a lot of time thinking about what the right move would be here.  When you have a nice, big space carve it up sparingly, cautiously.  This move was well thought out and you know that feeling you have when you’ve gotten around to project that is on your list, requires a lot of thinking and energy, and when scratched off the list makes your world a better place?  Here is my project of the month, half checked off.  I’ve got to get 13 4 inch recessed lighting cans in there on two dimmer switches, clean the walls up and I’m cruising for a bruising… I’m going to go nuts in there with the art this year, cannot wait.

I am building walls in my Water studio.  I have worked there for two years, feeling the space out.  It is a railroad apartment design, 15x55 feet, with windows on one face.  The ceiling hangs low as it is a basement unit, my second space, my work space.  There are support poles throughout the space which hold up I beams.  I put in some walls in order to section off my workshop space, my painting space, and my shooting/design space.  With the experience I gained from renovating my primary loft in the same building, I am designing an environment with lighting that will compliment my art and put me in the creative zone when I walk in there to work or play.  I am making a cocoon for painting with perfect lighting for any time of day creativity.  I am getting stronger in this department, designing fluid space for creative activities.  This sort of thinking is addictive.  Yesterday I fell into the zone with my assistant at 8am, my assistant left at 4pm and when I checked my phone for the time it was 10pm.  I still had a screw gun in my hand and was cutting sheet rock.  Although it is easier to sub work out when one does so one loses micro design control, which can make a big difference in limited spaces when one is fighting for inches like I am in this space.  The ceiling is low so I am belaboring the ceiling, where the 4 inch directional cans will go, how to build walls on tracks, how to put my big paintings on tracks so they can slide out and not scrape the floor, and so on.  I have a lot of specific needs for the space, and this is about smart design more than it is about spending more money.  I have learned that clean, simply designed space elevates the quality of life for those inside it, so I am applying my newfound knowledge to space number two.  I am planning to move into NYC this or next month, so the Water Studio will be my go to CT studio as I have found a renter for the nice loft above.

One would be surprised how crucial wetness and dryness are to a painter.  I live in this state my whole life.  I am a farmer herding canvases of varying degrees of wetness and dryness.  If a painting is wet one has limitations, same with a dry canvas.  This element trumps all in painting.  You’d be surprised how screwed you get when you walk up to the wet canvas with dry wit and an engine full of whoop ass; in this scenario you are done from the get go.  A crafty artist has to dance with each canvas in the way the canvas requires one to dance… after you leave your marks on a half finished canvas, the next day you’re a guest in that world and if you can’t dominate you had better be polite or you’re chopped liver.  And this here is table talk, one chewed up painter to another, lifetime lessons, forever…

Here’s Weeping Woman from 1996.  I’m working this weekend what else is new.  Making art… I slip into it as Tom Wolfe talks about slipping into the Times with his bath 32 years ago.  This old picture is a breakthrough ode to Munch of sorts, but mine was never stolen.  I’ve got some raw emotion here, a favorite picture that will do well at auction when I’m six feet under unless I blow up before then.  I’ll sell her for 10k this moving year, but I think my cards are a hold the rest of my life.  My kids get to figure her out if I have kids.

I just got back from DC.  The doctor can’t zap my floater as it’s too small and too close to the retina, which explains why it is so clear in my vision.  So I spend the rest of my life with it.  I’m disappointed but I’ve still got all my digits last I counted, so enough on this subject and back to art making.

I am on a day trip this week to remove a vitreous floater from my left eye, which appeared one day last May.  Floaters are spots in one’s eye that don’t go away.  People who don’t have them have no idea what this means.  People who have them know them well.  My floater is in the shape of two, overlapping capital Y’s in the dead center of my left eye vision.  As a painter this is difficult to negotiate.  When I am looking at a blank wall the floater moves with my eyes, distracts intensely and I argue weakens both eyes.  When I am painting from life I am rapidly moving my eye from subject to canvas, and the floater is large and follows me around.  The energy my body requires to eliminate this factor is draining and frustrating.  When the floater appeared I went into a depression for a couple weeks.  I’m not a depressive type; when I get some tough news I always find someone with a tougher story and remind myself that I have it easy.  But as a painter you want your eyes to work.

There is a doctor who lasers floaters, which are a grouping of cells that form a dark shadow in the eye vitreous.  There are very few doctors who perform this surgery, and this doctor has done thousands successfully.  I am cautiously optimistic.  I’ll report when I return. 

My collectors Donna and Tom commissioned a smaller version of my Five Musicians Painting of 1998.  The original is 8 ft tall.  Thanks Donna and Tom.

I just finished This Fingerprint Family Portrait. Thanks RJ.