"Found" paintings in the studio

Last week I wrapped up a painting I've been wrestling with since July.

Generally I don't spend so very long on a painting but this one was the first major image I tackled in the midst of our move to a new home (and hence my subsequent moving of my studio from the old home to my space at school.) When I move to a new studio, there is the inevitable "breaking in" time...I spend a good 6-8 months moving furniture around (working all the while) until I find just the best, most efficient arrangement. And in general I've just got to move through the stage of simply feeling a bit too aware of my body moving/working/negotiating a new space--invariably all this breaking in means a bit of a rift in studio flow. (I say all of this in mind of the fact that Christopher spent a good deal of yesterday knocking down a wall in what will be my eventual studio--a real-sized one at home where I'll move permanently come summer. Oh, another transition on the horizon...)

Finishing the painting that stuck around for six months felt like a victory--a necessary succesful outcome of the hazing my studio enacts on me by virtue of the space's newness. But this painting was also saddled with a very clear realization that something has come to an end in the work. Yes! to the paper. Yes! to the painting made incrementally--piece by piece by piece. But MORE is needed--and more must be achieved and still I am not fully sure what MORE means.

What to do? I wander. (An excellent and necessary studio activity more than periodically I believe...oh that we would ALL let ourselves wander with gusto more!)

At the end of today's studio wandering, I found myself clarifying my notion of what my expanded (more) notion of painting-making might be by taking pictures of all that seemed important/interesting/potential filled...all that I just might like to call a painting, but maybe cannot fully yet. Or all that seems to be PART of what I envision a painting to be but is still partial.

So these explain the above images. (And yes I know that artist palettes are such a cliche when speaking about painting as I am, but I will forever love them, and I do believe there is something to them, paint-a-phile that I am...)