The painting room!

Hello Friends,

Cathy and I are blessed to live in a lovely home. We live in a turn of the century rather large Victorian house with oak beams on the ceiling, lovely floors, nice woodwork, a modern kitchen, 4 bedrooms, a couple of baths, a nice large linen closet, an upstairs family room and .........the dreaded paint room.

To preface this article I must tell you that my wife is a wonderful homemaker. In spite of the fact that she works two jobs (the shop and public school) our house is almost always wonderfully clean and she is a wonderful cook as well. She works tirelessly to make sure that her family has a nice, normal home life and it is important to her that her house is tidy. Even with the 3 kids, the three dogs and me, the house manages to stay in great shape. But there is one room in the house that we have given up on.....our painting room.

Originally this room was some sort of closet or storage room...we aren't really sure. It is a very small room (8x10) and it has a bunch of stuff in it including two big tables, a big amoire for wood storage, bookcases, shelves, about 709879 surfaces, lots of paints, patterns, etc, etc. During the winter months we are in that room a lot but during the summer it is not unlikely for us to be in there for 8 - 10 hours a day. We paint all the time. It is funny that we have this huge old house but we spend most of our time in this little, tiny, over-crowded room. It also amazes me that this "black hole" is the home of so much beautiful art work. We stay in our painting room because at this point the mess is contained. We have a huge studio/store but it is away from our home and we want to be near the kids so for us... painting in a postage stamp is the best option.

I know that our painting room is a casualty of our unbelievable schedule. We have to prioritize and, quite frankly, a room that no one else ever sees and that would take us forever to clean, we let go. I know that if Cathy weren't juggling all of the things that we do our painting room would be spotless like the rest of our house. But for now it will have to do.

As we have reported before Cathy and I do a lot of shows in order to recruit new students. We have done well at these shows but one of the excuses we hear from people is that they do not have room to paint. Poppycock!!! If you have a kitchen table or a card table you can paint. We painted at our kitchen table for a long time before we started using our painting room. Currently we process about 300 paintings a year through our painting room. The point is this...it doesn't have to pretty, it doesn't have to be particularly organized or clean, it doesn't have to be permanent but, if you want to create beauty you can find the space. So for now we will continue to paint in our little tiny, messy, cramped room and love every minute of it.

I don't want you to think I am exaggerating so I have included a few pictures of our "lovely" space. When you are looking at the pictures please keep in mind that we spend many, many lovely hours in this room together! Thank God we like each other.

Have a great day,

Paul