Picking Up the Brush Again - An Artist Returns to Painting

The picture of me above has Schindler's grave cropped out.  I enjoyed that July 2019 day in Israel with my husband, Aharon. He always takes me to the most interesting places around the world. I have always been a very creative person. Traveling allowed me to photography some of the most iconic places around the world, feeding my creative monster. Then Covid happened and I was stuck in Dallas, Texas canceling trips and staying home like everyone else.

It happened by accident. I am a self-taught artist. One day after not holding a paintbrush for 16 years, I walked into a local craft store and purchase the largest canvas in stock. Big, really big, Texas Big!  A massive 60 by 48 inches and 48 by 48 inches canvases, ordered a giant easel and started painting again.  I was falling down the rabbit hole again in less than a week. My creative monster had been starving! Boxes were coming every day, sometimes 2 and 3 times a day, from Amazon, Micheals, and Arteza filled with paint tubes, brushes in every size, gold foil, and glitter. Oh, the glitter! I was in heaven painting away with all my brushes and palette knives for about all 3 weeks. 

I posted my first painting to my friends on Facebook then the shit hit the fan. All these amazing groups filled with artists worldwide doing "fluidart" or "pour painting." They posted about which 'house paint" made the best "pillows" for "blooms" and which one worked best for "Dutch Pours." The paintings were completed in minutes not weeks or months. The materials are just paint, no special mediums to create textures, no brushes to in all different sizes, simply paint. Which was perfect giving I didn't have a studio at this time. My creative monster was finally claiming and the mathematical side of my brain was being highly stimulated because there is a science to all painting.

Then it hit me like a tornado in Texas in the spring! I was paying bills, specifically PPG paint bills for our PAINTING COMPANY. Aharon and I own a multi-family painting company spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on paint, this EXACT paint. I wasn't buying a gallon at the local hardware store for $100, $60, or even 40 dollars I was purchasing five-gallon buckets for $30 to $70! Thousands of them a year to paint new apartments. If you don't know, everyone in the WORLD is moving to Texas, so apartments are being built everywhere. When we complete a new construction project, there are sometimes over a hundred buckets of paint left behind for the management to do touchup from move-ins. What do you think the most popular color to paint an apartment is...one guess...WHITE! The perfect "pillow" and base color are used in fluid art. 

Next, I was at my local PPG store buying gallons of paint blanks. My PPG sales representative called me and ask "What was I doing with all these gallon paint blanks? Did I realize that there is a worldwide paint shortage because of  Covid?" After explaining that I was doing some Dutch Pour paintings, Brad replied "Oh cool." That's the day I sent over a list for national discount pricing on Flood Floetrol, yellow and green painter's tape, epoxy resin, ram board floor protection, and every kind of paint remover in stock. My office for our painting company, ironic right, had become my make-shift studio and paint was everywhere.  Fluid art is really messing paint flys everywhere! Splattered on the walls, floor, doors, and curtains; pretty much if it was in my office it had paint on it. Canvases were stacking up in the closet, in random corners, stacked on file cabinets, I even hung one on the front of the 45 by 45 inch safe. Clean-up took forever! Resin on the floors, scraping paint off Aharon's walnut desk. That's when it became clear, I need a real studio again, and I had just the place picked out.