This weekend I finally made time to get into my studio (a welcome autumn rain kept me from the mundane work of pulling deck nails).

I’m at an impasse over wall color and furniture, but as you saw in my last post, the easel and drop cloth are in position and waiting. Once I found my paper, paints, brushes, and rags, I got to work.

I admit, I was a little fearful. I’ve heard artists say that once they moved out of the high traffic area of their home into a dedicated studio they’ve had trouble painting, as if their work was nourished by the chaos and mess of family. I worried, would this be true for me? Just think of all those portraits Mary Cassatt made of her family—not in her studio, but in the parlor, the living room, the garden.

I need not have worried. In the silence of my new studio, my muse found her place. As I reacquainted myself with my materials, ideas bubbled up. The paint flowed.

I finally began painting this work ( showed you the planning stage here), although I realized belatedly that I’m not quite finished with the drawing. Ah well, when I find my pencils…

This is just the beginning. You can see how I lay in the colors in large blocks.  I don’t worry about many details at this stage. I do try to make sure that every passage of wet paint has multiple colors in them, not just the local color. I don’t mess about with the colors as I put them down. I’ve made those decisions during the careful drawing stage, and which gives me a lot of freedom when I begin splashing paint around.

Then the fiddler called me to lunch, the sun came out, and the deck nails had to be pulled.