February 22, 2008

Popcorn Misc...


Unfinished Watercolor c. 1985

This is the week we have all the popcorn/cottage cheese gunk removed from the ceilings of the 'public' portions of the house. The dining room has been completed and the living room is wrapped and will be scrapped today. These people, a husband and wife team, know what they're doing and do it well! At least two layers of plastic sheeting drape all walls and any large pieces of furniture left in the room. She is especially meticulous, important for this incredibly muddy/dusty process. She's about ten years younger than I, making her no spring chicken, and has a Barbie like figure... not to mention being strong and flexible. Geeze, I gotta move around more!

J's taking notes and I can see it coming... watch for upcoming distress and anguish when he (we) start doing the bedrooms ourselves! He's already scraped one bathroom... just to see... arg!

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But back to art... I find myself in 'turning the page' mode. New work has been dispatched to two galleries, I've contracted for a show at an independent art center for Feb-March '09, and a gallery 3 person show Nov '08. The possibility of adding another gallery to my roster is in the works... I was approached and I'd be willing to give it a year's trial but I'm concerned that my pricing might not be a fit. I like to be in galleries where similar work is priced a bit higher than mine but that's not always the case since I don't have an aggressive marketing plan. I did check with a friend to verify that this gallery is responsible and pays promptly... more on this later, should it work out.

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Several days of gentle rain... the kind that makes you wish you hadn't forgotten to spread the 10-10-10 into the ivy and under the trees. Fertilizer does more harm than good when there is little moisture involved and I should be taking advantage while these early spring rains can be counted on... and double the effort at the lake house! Where, btw, we will be spending more time as soon as the dust settles around here. This ceiling cleansing project will stretch into next week for sure and I'm getting no time in the studio (my bad.) Strangers in the house interfere with concentration, donchaknow? Plus I'm trying to make sense of the new camera which was shipped separately from the memory card which hasn't shown up yet so only have a bit of built in memory to play with... not enough for real experimenting.

Didn't I say, earlier in this post, that there is good reason to be working ahead? Accumulating paintings for upcoming shows before real summer distractions set in? Obviously not playing the game but hey!... ordered a big batch of stretchers yesterday... long ones! Counts for something!

8 comments:

Daphne Enns said...

Good morning Karen.

So, you stretch your own canvas and use nails but order the stretchers? Would you mind telling me from where and how deep are your stretchers?

I just bought 12 oz canvas and was going to have him build stretchers. Which is fine but I did want to ask someone with experience how deep you make your canvases.

I'm gearing up for work too and am wondering how realistic it is too what with summer around the corner...

Karen Jacobs said...

For years I used Utrecht.com bars and still think they are terrific but I discovered Creative Mark bars from ASW http://tinyurl.com/2gfqzq
are cheaper and deeper. This is my second order, I found some niggly things I wasn't crazy about in the first order... if the same hicups are still present I'll probably go back to Utrecht.

Daphne Enns said...

Thanks so much!

Lisa Call said...

Your popcorn scraping reminds me of my childhood. Laying on the top bunk of my bunkbed scraping lines and shapes into the popcorn ceiling with my finger nails.

Karen Jacobs said...

Um... lines and shapes sorta stuck with you, didn't it? ;-) I can imagine the carvings as early work...

CMC said...

Yeah, I wanted that stuff off my 60's ceilings too....now I may just leave them if the house is sold and forget about it. Let me know the procedure just in case. However, I don't know how well it can be scraped off once it's been painted a number of times.

Joanie Gagnon San Chirico said...

I HATE popcorn! What a stupid invention. Unfortunately, it's all through my house too and such a daunting job to get rid of and some of our ceilings are 20 feet high in the cathedral ceiling-ed living room. In the rooms we've done, we've found that there area all kinds of imperfections in the ceilings underneath, which of course is why the lazy builders used it in the first place. Good luck with your project!

Karen Jacobs said...

So far, so good! We're very tempted to let them do the rest of the house... but, so many projects and only so much money to deal out!