November 6 - December 7, 2016
Room Painting Project
It didn’t matter what day of the week it was or what was going on that day.
My alarm would go off, I would get ready for the day, then I would drive down the hill to the hardware store.
Many days I would see the same store manager. After a few visits and a description of my project he would be waiting with a smile and a pocket full of coupons for me. I so appreciated his friendly manner and those coupons!
At the paint section was were the magic happened. I would navigate through the paint chips until I found the one for that day. The one color that felt like how I was feeling in that moment. I would get two gallons mixed up and head to my studio.
Some days I would walk right up to The One. Other days I would have a handful of color chips to wrestle a single one out of.
Most days I was able to paint the room (a space in my studio staged to be a small room) before I did anything else. Then I lived with that color for the duration of the day. So did my studio mate - some days she was grumpier than others.
Some days were bright, some days were dark, some days were blotchy, and some days the previous color showed through a little bit.
At first I would move all of the objects out of the space and paint them. Then, move them back after painting the room. This only lasted a couple of days before I realized I wanted the paint to fuse these objects to the room. So, I would brush. I would roll. I would stand on my head or lay on my side. I would balance on a stool to reach the top of the lamp. It was a dance. A dance with the space and its objects.
This project was intended to be a meditation in efforts to externalize my feelings as well as a minor study in color theory.
What I became attached to the most was the build up of the paint layers. It was a tangible expression of what I tried very hard to keep inside or to myself. It coated everything and could be read like the layers of geological time.
When the project was over I was able to cut around the edges of the floor where the walls met the concrete ground. Then with an extra set of hands and some physically exertion we rolled up the layers of paint on the floor like a carpet.
