My eyes are crooked.  Seriously, my eyes are slightly misaligned – the right one is a millimeter higher than the left.   I have been aware of this since I was a teenager when it dawned on me that the reason why I could never get my eyeliner to look right was because one lid was shaped with a little more of a slope and the other eye was a little higher…so it goes, but it makes for some frustrating asymmetry when drawing.

The current work is a triptych of self-portraits…my internal monologues with Goya.  Each drawing is about 18 x 17 inches:  smaller, straightforward self-portraits with concentrated and candid observation.  I will post these drawings as I finish them.

At my husband’s insistence (via repeated suggestion), I have rented a storage space for my finished and framed drawings.  I suspect that a commercial that we saw for the “Hoarders” show on A&E was the catalyst (“Hey – that looks just like my studio!“) but, in truth, I cannot organize the studio supplies that I use because I can barely navigate the framed drawings I have stacked in my studio space.  I cannot even shift my chair to the left or right more than a couple of inches…it really is that bad.

Plus, there are little frustrations such as the day that I spent 45 minutes looking for the circle template (the second one that I have purchased this year) and as a last resort I ended up tracing glasses out of the kitchen (and not the exact circle size I needed) – a particularly exasperating instance when I knew that I owned something but I could not put my hands on it at the moment when it was desperately needed.

I suppose I could stop doing such large drawings that need to be framed…but since this drawing thing is a compulsion, that is not going to happen unless heavy medication is involved.

I remember asking one of my studio art professors what he was going to do with his stockpile of 15 x 20 foot paintings after his death…oh wait, digression:  I really am not that tacky or insensitive to ask an artist what they were going to do with the paintings that did not sell during his/her lifetime – this professor, both self-absorbed and eccentric, held one very open-forum class during each semester that was an “ask me any question about my experience as an artist, anything, no holds barred” so he encouraged this sort of dialogue.  My other question during one of these forums was whether or not women and men painted differently because of their actual physical differences (the innie-outie question), which, oddly, he shied away from answering, but the death question got him very excited…his answer was that since he owned the old high school gym in town (the only space large enough for his paintings) he had already made a stipulation in his will that the building would be sealed with his paintings left inside, protected, until anyone cared or bothered to get them out.

Alas, I do not think I will find a spare gymnasium anytime soon.  So, it is time for a good cleanout, a good system of organization, some fun trips to Ikea (oh Swedish storage paraphernalia, how I do love thee), and then I can at least move my chair around…perhaps I will even get one of those rolly-chairs since I will have some room for momentum when I wheel myself around the studio.