You may have heard of “Salon Style,’ a phrase which has particular meaning for artists. What comes to mind is not so much a good comb-out as a vision of wall-to-wall floor-to-ceiling paintings. In centuries past, most art shows would have been hung this way, cheek-to-jowl, every square inch crowded with works jostling one another. The "modern" period saw the pendulum swung sharply back in the other direction; huge public gallery rooms might and still do house only four paintings - one for each wall. I can never decide whether this reflects the luxury of space or an extreme paucity of the imagination.

While I theoretically aim for a midpoint, our wee house has been creeping back in style. This is not so much an aesthetic consideration as a practical one — paintings are meant to reside on the wall rather than under the bed and so today found me once again perching precariously up and down the staircase with hammer in hand. In our stairwell at least, the salon is literally on the rise.

At least I'm no longer wrestling with heavy watercolours. Of the several impulses which directed me towards oil, framing was one. The final straw with watercolour was the moment when, after having spent half an hour cleaning the glass and then carefully screwing the whole combination of backing, painting, double mat and glass into the frame, I turned it over to find that a bug had crawled in to die. Crap. I also had to admit to myself that I probably shouldn't  work with glass;  for one thing, I can't afford the blood loss.  I have always thought Polonius’ injunction to Laertes to “Know thyself/ to thine own self be true” should have earned him more respect from Hamlet, but there you go.

So using oil pigments on stretched canvas offered an escape from complicated framing or, at least I thought so until I finished the first large big painting and realized that I somehow still had to hang it. hmmm. When I decided to shop for an oil frame, I realized that what had been a light and portable object would be transformed by that addition into what amounted to a piece of furniture;  just like that, my fancy of easy seasonal change-overs of subject matter and palette vaporized. Then Lyla suggested that the next piece could be painted on a “gallery” canvas, one built with deep stretchers. Eureka! All problems solved simultaneously — extra space around the edges to wrap the image, good strong construction, and minimal weight. Bring it on!

But of course I am drawn like a moth to the flame by these light and large expanses of canvas - which brings us back to that issue of limited wall space. This is the newest goliath asking to be shoe-horned onto a wall;  it's now hanging in the stairwell but we both could have done without the wrestling match.  It's wishful thinking that babes like this might develop some self-hanging inclinations but I am haunted by the memory of an elderly friend whom I helped move house.  Frank ran out of patience and simply hauled a batch of wonderful oil paintings to the curb with a "Free to a good home" sign.  Neighbours emerged from their burrows like carpenter ants in spring.

I don't think I'm there yet but I promise to post advance notice if it comes to that.  "Coming to a curbside near you...."

Monica and I had the brains on Tuesday to cancel our walk:  it was raining and  close to zero, as I later discovered when planting a few errant bulbs and scattering some echinacea seeds where they would do the most good.  After ten minutes in the garden, my fingers were numb but  not so useless that I could refuse to begin the second in my “Up, Up and Away” series.  I should have remembered that life is so rarely smooth.   While the first 3’ by 4’ painting had been oriented as landscape, the second was definitely asking to be tall and slim,  like a portrait. I have never tried to fit anything taller than 40” into the tiny stone studio.  Sure,  I expected to have to work from a stepstool to reach the top, but it quickly became clear that I had sadly underestimated the capacity of my work lights and studio easel to rise to a 48” occasion.  Hmmm.  


Plan B:  Drag out the second large easel and figure out where to set it up so I wouldn’t need extra lighting.  Remember, small house.  The TV room and living room were impossible and that left the dining room.  Our table will seat ten if it absolutely must, but its redeeming feature is that it is a ’gate-leg” and will collapse back into a small desk size.  That has meant that the dining room has also functioned as a tai chi studio for one.  (And as if that weren’t great enough, I can put a small new painting on the piano and get a fresh look at it  every time a turn is in order.   All painters know how easy it is to overwork a piece so, again, thank-you dining room!)  Surely it would be greedy to ask more of this space.  


As I studied the room while maneuvering the twelve square foot canvas, I suddenly realized that the double windows face north.  Bonanza!  If I set up right next to them and adjusted this easel for a large canvas in portrait orientation, Bob would surely be my uncle.  Dear Old Bob.  And thus it came about that today our dining room was christened in its new identity:  art studio/tai chi space/ eatery!!  As long as MPAC doesn’t feel the need to triple the taxable floor space, it’s all good.  Now all I have to do each day is to remember why I have come to the dining room….

​So the question I began this post with is not rhetorical in the least.  Few of my questions are.

I had a sore throat for several days this week and quarantined myself at home.  Even for an  enthusiastic sleeper (my whole family happily headed for bed at 10:15), I rarely sleep  around the clock once, let alone two days in a row.  Boredom is the worst torture I can endure so first I ripped into my brother's birthday books  (his birthday,not mine).  Virtuously, I had previously stifled the urge to devour them but assured myself that no one could begrudge a poor sick woman a few stolen moments with somebody else's books. Miriam Toews' All My Puny Sorrows proved to be so brilliant, so heart-breaking and so hilarious that it was necessary to finish it.  I think I got most of the jam off of the pages too.  I plan to buy another copy (you should too) so perhaps I'll give Scott the pristine one.   The Buried Giant is less mesmerizing but I love Ishiguro's work so will no doubt finish that too tonight.

But one can't live by words alone.  The canvas called, so I hauled out the step ladder and  started working through the transparent glazes.  Usually I am fairly disciplined but a high fever makes short work of sensible work plans and I have been painting everywhere on the canvas, while trying to keep track of what stage each section had reached.  

When Jon came home last night, he found me wearing my pj's, an outdoor jacket, a tuque, and a blue housecoat on top.  Apparently I was also sporting a blue moustache.  Tonight might be no better.  Well, it worked for Dali.

In any case, seeing as the right side is further ahead, here is a  2' x 3' slice of it.  There's still a long long way to go and you can count on the sky no longer remaining pink.  

After kvetching about the difficulty of working on a large (3' by 4') canvas, guess what? The image which is demanding the Leviathon is one I took from a plane window.  The glorious landscape which unrolled itself before me was simply much too grand for anything smaller.  So here I am again, in a studio which remains seven by ten despite my attempts to enlarge it by means of mind control. The width of working space I have is not quite four feet across, with the result that yet again like a Dancing with the Stars male lead I am rotating and sliding this monster of a canvas around.  

Unfortunately, I seem to have lost my show biz touch.  Granted,  Brainsex (the best overview of M.I.T. research on gender differences I have ever read) did report that the average male is better than the average female at rotating a three-dimensional object in space.  My parking reliably demonstrates this theorem. I remind you that there are many tasks at which the female brain trumps the male, but that is not my point here. As Brainsex predicted, my three-dimensional canvas, though only an inch and a half deep, failed to complete one of my rotations.  Somehow, mid-somersault, I had managed to wedge the top rail onto the adjustment screw at a tilt of about 70 degrees both sideways and front-to-back and there the wet canvas hung despite heroic efforts to pull it off.

To make things worse, I had a date with a five-year old friend; Grace is an art aficianado with an inquisitive mind.  My watercolour kit was packed and ready to go.  All I had to do was to wrestle the blasted canvas off the easel so that it could dry in a flat position.  I briefly considered calling the fire department but reason weighed in. Teetering on my stepstool-for-big-paintings, I reflected on the possible headlines:  "Artist Throws Herself into Painting" or "Novel Method of Applying Makeup Proves Fatal."  Suddenly the blinking thing released, and I staggered backward and fell over a footstool, smeared with burnt umber and white but triumphant.  

Grace and I had a lovely time.  It may be a while before I get all of the marbling off the stone walls in the studio, though.