Not long ago I bought two long rectangular canvases to paint on, and last week, with Peter and Kelly on Syros, I converted my home back into a studio to do this painting. It’s not like I haven’t got about 6 unfinished paintings lying around needing work…

The brief for this one was something beachy, in neutral tones to go over the bed in an air bnb. Once I decided what I was going to paint it went pretty smoothly, though there were a couple of false starts… Hence (good word) it took me almost all week to finish it.

Given my entire kitchen/living room is my studio, I painted on my kitchen table and set it on the stove to dry between sessions. That way I could look at it when I wasn’t working on it, to decide what it needed. Its my process. I need to live with my work a while before I decide its done and can sign it.

My life is in a constant state of moving things around – off the kitchen table and bench so I can cook, back so I can work, from here to there, from there to here but a little to the left, then back again…

And now mom is staying with me, I have to cook almost every day… Mom is a real greek housewife and she expects me to be one too… sigh… I never cooked every single day, but I make her breakfast every morning and I cook lunch one day, eat leftovers the next. However, I must make a fresh salad every day.

This is not easy for me; I don’t cook much. Not since quite a few years ago when an ex felt the food I cooked wasn’t filling enough cause there was not nearly enough meat to satisfy his manly hunger. Since then, I basically cook what I want to eat and if you/he/anyone doesn’t like it, they’re welcome to cook for themselves.

So, the studio has been sacrificed to the kitchen gods. At least for a while.

But mom is getting stronger every day (thanks to my amazing cooking!) and hopefully she’ll be back to full strength soon enough.

BTW – The staged photos are thanks to Photoshop… After all, how else am I going to stage something when I don’t have the wall space?

Here is a photo of it in its new home:

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