It's finally happening. My beloved travel easel is buckling under the immense pressure of giant canvases. My tiny apartment is suddenly too tiny. My imposter syndrome is too big for them.
My elevator pitch used to be, "What started as a road trip in 2017 ended as a quest to paint every mountain range in Wyoming." Now it's, "Please buy a painting I'm literally running out of room."
I have STACKS of paintings under my couch. I have an overwhelming amount of things on the walls. I have a pile of paintings under paintings. I have unused canvases squirreled away behind furniture. I have at least four jars of evaporating paint thinner full of abused paint brushes around the house. There are empty frames stuffed into bookshelves.
You know what I don't have? A storefront. You know why? Frames are fucking expensive. You know what you need to sell panel paintings? Frames. How do I circumvent that requirement? Wrapped, stretched canvas.
Now here's the worst part of my strategy. I have never started with easy. When I started ceramics, I jumped right to teapots when I was wasnt "ready." I skipped acrylic painting and went straight to oil. The first time I painted a mountain range, I got a 24x48 canvas. I learn from my mistakes, like composition and value. I do not learn from my mistakes with size. The multiple stretched canvases in my house are the following sizes: 24x48, 24x36, 30x40, 36x40.
Great. I've solved the frame issue. Now comes the unbearable and astonishingly horrific shipping process. I don't even want to touch it with a ten foot pole, let alone my wallet.
It's not that I don't have the solutions to all these problems at face value. I just have an adult sized stack of bills and can't throw money at everything. So no, I'm not a starving artist. I'm an economically strangled one.
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