Starting to organize the new studio

Foreshortening study, approx. 11" x 14", Conté on paper.

From art school.

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So, I'm making a little progress on figuring out how to organize stuff to be able to create some working space in the new studio. 
This is a view from up in the loft (storage for canvases), looking down into the studio space. Feel some vertigo? Me too. It's actually rather terrifying to lug big canvases up and down the ladder. I had to buy three different ladders before I got one tall enough (8 ft.). Technically you're not supposed to step on the top two steps, so I guess I really need a 10-foot ladder, but forget it.
I'm figuring out how to maneuver: you constantly alternate with your right hand, switching that hand every other rung between using the wall ladder and the floor ladder; while carrying a painting in your left hand; and using your feet on the floor ladder. The top rung of the wall ladder is a bit loose, too, making everything more challenging because you have to remember to avoid it during the transition from top of ladder (on the very top step, which of course you shouldn't be using in the first place) to standing on the actual loft.
But it's great to have that storage space, even if it is a bit life-threatening to use it. Nevertheless, I will still have major space problems in this studio. Four times smaller is a lot smaller, when it comes to an art studio with three different media.

Floor view of the (currently unusable because too crowded with stuff) art studio space.

Can you find my little helper in the photo? He won't be allowed in once there's wet paint happening.

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Sadly, still no news of Cleo. I'll certainly tell you in the future if there is any. I check the Humane Society website's photos of found cats every day.

I actually had a dream last night that she showed up at the old house. Not too realistic since in the dream, I myself was still living in the house.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch... The gang's all here, and there's no room for me on the bed. (Note Crazy Rumi's crazy face.)

More art on my website: jalapfaff.com

Untitled 223

Pastel on Sennelier LaCarte, approx. 2" x 7".

From the Strata series.

Art purchase inquiries: please email me: jala [at] jalapfaff [dot com].

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 Cleo is usually a well-behaved girl in the studio. But the other day I discovered this on the floor:

Miss Lemon loves the springtime...

...she was sitting right in front of these tiny blue flowers and seemed to be admiring them.

More art on my website: jalapfaff.com

Untitled 195

Pastel on UArt, approx. 5" x 6".

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Bursting at the seams: my studio (at least for however long it's still mine to work in).

Still haven't been able to find a new studio space. And when I do, I can't even imagine the process of trying to move everything--especially all the hundreds of unframed pastels pinned up on the walls.

In this photo, on the left you can see, pinned on the far back wall of the studio, about a fourth of my finished, unframed smaller-format Rothko-esque pastels. 

On the right, a couple of large oils in progress on the floor, and pinned up, some slightly larger, even more minimalist Rothko-esque pastels I've been doing lately (none posted yet). I think they're 9" x 12". When it's time to frame any of them, I'll probably need to get bigger frames than the current 11" x 14" frames I usually use; I think a bit more white mat around them would be better.

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Another lazy day on the green sofa.

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In Bihar, India.

$115.00 - Untitled 195 (Ready to Frame)

More art on my website: jalapfaff.com

Life drawing...and a studio incident

Life drawing class the other night went well. It will be continuing for a few more weeks, which is great, though I'm not sure I'll be here for all of them (may be going to India again at some point soon, for the business).

The timing of the next drawings was, respectively: 20 minutes, 45 minutes, 20 minutes. The last one is my favorite.

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So there was a little studio incident the other night... When I woke up I heard some frantic meowing. I couldn't figure out where it was coming from, and then it stopped, so I shrugged and went about my morning. Then it started up again. Was it coming from outside? I looked behind the house, looked in front of the house. Then, quiet for a while. Then, more meowing. Finally, I happened to walk past the (glass) studio door (which connects the house and studio) and saw a stripey little Lynx face peering at me anxiously and meowing insistently. Apparently, Lynx got trapped in the studio sometime during the night. I'm guessing I hadn't latched the door well and he went in and then when he tried to come back out, he probably stood on his hind legs and pressed against the door and it latched shut. (They're always standing like that looking in when I'm in the studio.) Lynx was very grateful to be rescued (he's a cat who's very nervous about new situations) and got quiet for a while, but then started meowing again, which was odd, because he rarely uses his voice.

So an hour or two goes by and I realize I haven't seen The Midget (sorry, but that's one of Rumi's nicknames...I'm embarrassed...okay, some of his other nicknames, as long as I'm embarrassing myself, are: MonkeyPie, Pink Cadillac, GhostPuppy, The Prince, WhiteChild, Mr.Pink, Tiny-ness, and Midgetino) all morning. So I go look in all his favorite sleeping places around the house: papasan chairs, kitchen cupboards, on top of my computer bag...nada. Strange. And he couldn't be in the studio, because I'd already been in there, and he would've heard me and wanted out, like Lynx.

It actually took a few minutes for the fact to register: Oh. Rumi's deaf. He wouldn't have heard me. Back I go into the studio, searching everywhere for a non-frantic kitty (no meows, no sad face at the window)...and finally find him, curled up happily sound asleep inside a box of framed pastels covered with brown paper in a corner.

Needless to say, there were some painting casualties in the studio. And I didn't notice this until later in the evening:

Nearly impossible to get these shots, as Rumi loves both people and the camera, so it was very hard to get behind him; he kept turning around instantly while I ran around the table like a maniac.

Well, I've always thought he looks like a blank canvas with a lot of potential...


More art on my website: jalapfaff.com

Garlic...and shadow box setup

Tried out a new surface last night, a double-oil-primed linen panel from Ray-Mar. I liked it in some ways, didn't in others (as is typical of everything, from painting surfaces to life in general).


Wonderful artists and blogger-friends Loriann Signori and Casey Klahn asked me about my still life setup. A picture is worth... so here's a photo rather than a detailed and confusing explanation.


The silvery thing in the right-corner foreground is the metal spotlight (cheap adjustable artist's spotlight into which I put a daylight-simulation bulb). The shadow box is, as you can see, the essence of low-tech: just cardboard with a couple of sides ripped off. A lot of people use cloth for their backdrops; I use paper, because it gives me a cleaner shadow shape and simply because I tend to enjoy painting just the object without any other subject matter (e.g., cloth folds) to distract the eye. I ordered a bunch of cardstock paper in tons of different colors for the backdrop colors. I also really enjoy changing the color of the paper on the sides to give interesting colors in the reflected light (wish I could claim this idea, but it's extrapolated from the marvelous book How To See Color and Paint It by Arthur Stern, which I believe is out of print; it cost me $60 a few years ago on Amazon and I just checked and it's now about $90. I only ever did a few of the exercises in the book--it's nearly all exercises--but the concepts are so exciting and become ingrained after even just a couple of exercises. If you're curious and don't want to buy it, try to have your public library order it from an interlibrary loan. I get to borrow TONS of painting books that way!).


The single light source is extremely important in order to produce unambiguous shadows, both form and cast. I'd love to someday try painting with only north light, but my studio has skylights and windows on every side--!--which is a lovely thing, but bad for painting. Because of this, I only paint at night so that I can control the direction of the light source.


To the right of my shadow box, you can see how I impatiently just shove potential subject-matter objects and already-painted objects over on the countertop. Recognize any of those? :) I also love how the little wooden guy has ended up sort of saluting the clay models over there.

$115.00 - Growing garlic (Ready to Frame)

More art on my website: jalapfaff.com

The art studio

What does your art studio (or art space) look like?

We are incredibly fortunate to have an actual art studio as part of our house. Granted, it also doubles as general storage and Where The Hell Do We Put That Stuff While We Decide What To Do With It space. Hence (and I can use this as my excuse), it's always pretty messy. The Husband was teasing me about that fact, and it does seem a bit odd, because in the rest of my life I like to be rather neat, but it's true--the studio is often a disaster. HOWEVER, I do know where (most) everything that I need is. (And NB: these pics are just a couple of days AFTER I did a pretty major cleaning/reorganizing in there.)

Anyway, I was recently reading a small book called Living the Artist's Life (by Paul Dorrell). It's a rather opinionated, all-over-the-place piece of writing, but it had its moments. One I especially appreciated was how you go into these museums and see these wonderful works of art in these very special spaces designed just for the piece of artwork, or at least arranged to complement it, and you're not supposed to touch it, and everything is very clean and "manicured," etc.  So one thing I really liked was when the author of this book reminded us readers that every single piece of art you see in the museum came from someone's messy art studio somewhere. And that not only did a beautiful piece come from a messy, cluttered, disorganized, possibly dirty space, but that sometimes that was the only worthwhile piece that ever came out of that studio.

So what does all this mean? Possibly just that when we make two or three things in our life that are rather wonderful, we should feel perfectly satisfied.

More art on my website: jalapfaff.com