Finishing Up

Finishing Up

6 x 6"

oil on board

© Nicki Ault, 2017

sold

Hi!

Happy New Year!

It has been awhile... far too long actually. As it turns out I got really sick on December 30 and it didn't subside until January 2. I am not sure I have ever had such pain and pressure in my sinuses before... and that is saying a lot because I generally get pretty bad head colds when a virus hits me. I haven't been in bed so early on New Year's Eve since the kids were little and we used to pretend that when the ball dropped at midnight in New York it was the same time here!

In other news, I have been having trouble with my laptop for awhile, so my most excellent brother-in-law offered to use his computer prowess to help me get it running better. Long story short, I told him my files were backed up on my external hard drive because I thought they were. Nope. The last three years were not. Clearly I do not know what I am doing where computers are concerned and as a result I should never speak with such confidence. From this day forward I shall always finish any statement I make regarding computers with "... I think... maybe we should double check". The most current status on my files and data is that my most excellent brother-in-law downloaded some sort of recovery program and has hopefully found the lost files, but there are thousands and thousands of images to sort through and weed out and put back in folders and rename. I have a bit of a job ahead of me, but lesson learned.

Finally, yesterday I was able to slot in some time to get to the studio and paint. this is the first time I have painted since before the Open Studio, in other words about six weeks. That shocks me. I decided to do a little study to get my head in the game for a commission I am about to start. I was rusty and working rather slow. At about 2:15 I realized I only had another forty-five minutes before I had to leave, so I tried to step up the pace. In a bit of a fluster I proceeded to drop the painting face down on my palette. UGH! When I turned it over I stared at the three blobs of paint down the centre of my sky and almost wiped the whole thing clean. The teeny tiny side of me that can be tenacious reared its head and decided that 2017 wasn't going to get the best of me one week in. I grabbed my metal palette knife and carefully scraped away the mess trying not to disturb the image below too much. It worked! I finished up the painting and left the studio on schedule.

My take-aways from the last week go something like this:

1) your eyeballs won't pop out of their sockets no matter how much pressure is in your sinuses

2) back up your back ups and then assume it didn't work, so double check and then back them up correctly and then get someone else to double check because you don't know what you are doing where computers are concerned, and finally...

3) all is not necessarily lost when you have a studio mishap, so keep calm and scrape on.  

Bring it 2017!