Holiday Recap (WIR 20240101)

Happy New Year!

I’m happy to be moving out of the Holiday Season. It’s been nice to spend some extra time with Liv and the kids, but I’m ready to get back to work! I’ll put up a studio update soon. Exciting stuff is happening with computers and motors and things. I also even managed to finish a regular painting.

Holiday Recap

We had a very Covid Christmas and a Covid New Year. We had planned on going to NYC to visit Liv’s family for Christmas, and I had a $1.3k Air BnB travel credit we were originally going to use to get a place near the boy’s grandparents apartment. The credit was set to expire at the end of the year. We found a nice looking place, but the host canceled the reservation on us a week before the holiday and there wasn’t anything else suitable available, so we booked a hotel instead and used the travel credit to book a nice place for a friends get together for New Years Eve. We got a great deal on the hotel with Hotwire and we were pretty excited.

Then the boys both got Covid a few days before Christmas. I had to stay home with them on what would have been my last shopping day, and we canceled our trip to New York. We couldn’t get a cash refund for the hotel, but Hotwire was kind enough to give us “Hot Bucks” to use on our next trip.

So we had a quiet Christmas just the four of us. We opened presents and went out to the Scoot Zone (a big parking lot complex for an abandoned industrial campus near our house) so T could try out his new (to him) Kettcar and we could all stay away from other humans.

Then I got Covid too the day before we were planning to leave for New Years. Some of the friends we were splitting the Air BnB with canceled too, and through what I will blame on miscommunication and Covid Brain, I canceled and then re-booked our NYE Air BnB, but due to the intricacies of the re-booking process, we were not able to use that travel credit. We were planning on having Covid positive members of our family stay behind, so the Covid negative members could still go hang out with friends on NYE, but those friends canceled anyway and so our whole family drove down to Little Compton, RI and the four of us slept two nights in a big old house near the beach with room for three families. We called it the Ship House. It was still nice. We walked to the beach and looked at rocks and things. It was F’s first time seeing the ocean, and only T’s second or third. We only stayed two nights and left a day early, spending the NYE at home like it was any other Sunday.

What a baby on his daddy’s shoulders on a rocky Rhode Island beach might look like

In Conclusion

We ended up doing a lot less for New Years and Christmas this year than we had planned and paying a lot more than we expected. (I also just found out a travel credit I had with Delta expired yesterday . . . aargh.) I’m grateful the three of us who had covid have had pretty mild cases. I’m happy to have gotten to spend some good quality time with Liv and the boys. T has even said both nights that we’ve been back, without prompting, when we say our good-nights after story-time, that he liked staying at the Ship House. We really haven’t traveled much with these kids. Hopefully we can find a way to travel more in 2024.

A Butterfly that Lives Forever

It’s been a minute. I got busy. I had a big commission that really took a lot of my time straight after graduating from my MFA program (I graduated!), and after that I had to focus on moving back into my studio in Lowell and out of our basement (my pandemic studio) so we can make room for a family room and a place for the kids to play and watch tv and stuff.

I’m not quite back up and running in my Lowell studio, but I am making good progress. The space had kind of turned into a bit of a storage space during the pandemic, but I've got it nicely organized now and have removed a bunch of junk. The main setback recently has been that my workbench, the thing I actually put paintings on while I am putting paint on them has for the last several years been made up of three Ikea desks pushed up against each other, the kind with the metal legs that screw into a sort of pressed wood fiber desk surface. Those were all desks I got used in the first place and they’ve been with me through the pandemic basement studio, three different spaces in the Lowell studio building, Miller St. studios in Somerville, Lophouse Studio in Brighton, and Brambleberry Studio in Cambridge. So, they finally gave it up. The screws that hold the surfaces to the metal legs no longer had any grip. The tops of the surfaces were also coated in so much paint that it was actually starting to cause a problem with making my painting surfaces uneven.

So, I tossed them out instead of moving them back. That meant I didn’t have anything to paint on! I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but last week I hit upon a pretty good solution and I bought a couple of 80” x 36” hollow wooden doors from Lowe’s. I think I can mount the old legs from the desks to these and end up with a nice 80” x 72” work surface that will still fit over the flat-files that hold my big works on Yupo. So! New work coming soon! I am still on daddy duty a lot of the time and mostly usually only have one day a week to get to the studio, but I think I can actually make that a productive day now.

A Butterfly that Lives Forever

In the meantime, I’ve got a bunch of work that I collected in my studio while I was re-organizing stuff that I hadn’t previously cataloged, mostly from 2019 and 2022. I just got pictures of these pieces, and here is the first new piece. It’s called “A Butterfly that Lives Forever”. Let me know what you think in the comments.

This little painting is a swirling vortex of paint and collage material with pencil and marker drawing in the background. Structured pattern is stacked against chaotic poured paint with cartoon doodles, hand-written text, and machine printed elements all layered one on top of another resulting in a system that feels somehow balanced but like it might fly apart at any moment.

This is a little abstract painting on wooden panel.

The painting is available for purchase on Singulart.