Big Time

I pulled out one of my large stretcher frames and am looking forward to getting the surface ready. I’ve been wanting to go larger again and decided the time was now. Over the next week or two that I prepare this canvas, I have plenty of others in progress. The blue piece in the previous post is still fairly early on and I look forward to seeing where it goes.

I haven’t done a canvas from scratch this year. For a time, I was exclusively using my own canvases, but after the girls were born my life became much more centered around time. There is something sublime about sizing and laying down the priming white layer after layer until the surface is almost glass-like in its smoothness. On a canvas this size, it takes a lot of work but is to my mind so worth it in terms of what I have to paint on when it’s done.