What a change fourteen years makes.

[logansrogue]

So, today I tried stretching a canvas. At the moment I'm totally defeated. I can't press the staple gun firmly enough on the frame to get the staples to go in correctly. I can't pull tightly enough on the canvas to get the right tension. It's too big, too tough, too difficult. My hands are too weak and I just can't keep up the strength.

I feel like such a fucking failure as an artist. A real artist can stretch her own damned canvases! She can carry heavy loads and make shit from scratch. The way they used to in the old days, damn it! :(

I remember at sixteen I could stretch canvases like a fuckin' pro. My canvases didn't warp or get loose. They were as much works of art as the paintings I did on them. The way this canvas is going, I wouldn't feel right selling the artwork on it. It's a mess.

Comments

[stephbg.livejournal.com]

Turn the bug into a feature: do something with the warping. Fine art is cruel, but SF lets you get away with murder :-)

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

No no, already one warped canvas with a painting on it, I don't want two. My sister is taking the canvas off the stretcher and starting fresh tomorrow. Then I can get shit done, hopefully.

The warped painting will have Tom Baker on it. Apropos.

[nephron.livejournal.com]

Yeah, a real artist would get apprentices to grind all their paints, what are you doing?

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Heh, point taken. I'm also not painting with lead. Or other similarly poisonous metals.

[purrdence.livejournal.com]

Or cutting your ear off and mailing it to people...

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Or running through giant prints of famous paintings with jousting sticks on camera.

[annlarimer.livejournal.com]

I just buy 'em at the store. Preferably on sale. "Yeah, this'll hold a rocketship or a fish with a monocle. And it's three dollars."

[hippiegal22.livejournal.com]

The older you get the less time you have to spend on your hobbies. ( Well at least if you have a job/school/family.) So something that you could do in no time as a teen takes longer when your older because that darn thing called the real world gets in the way.

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Well, painting isn't my hobby, it's my career. I'm disabled, unemployed and I live at home, so painting is basically giving me some financial boosting so I'm not living on sweet fuck all.

Time isn't the problem, my health is. I'm really unfit, man. :T

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

Ah, nads to that. My stepgran is an awesome artist, and an amazingly active woman - she swims at Cottesloe every day come hell or high water, and was in the UWA Choral Society for decades.

And she gets my uncle to stretch canvases for her.

As a sensible cat once said, "there are people who do these things" (Garfield stopped Jon from cleaning up a spill - a frame or so later, Odie turned up and licked up the mess)

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

It's okay - I'm not weak. The staple-gun is broken. *phew*

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

:)