I started up an email newsletter October 4, 2024 and I’m posting it as a blog here. If you’d like to get these monthly, sign up easy here: http://eepurl.com/dHIgT1
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Get ready for my Black Friday Sale
I started up an email newsletter October 4, 2024 and I’m posting it as a blog here. If you’d like to get these monthly, sign up easy here: http://eepurl.com/dHIgT1
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As I set up my half-size french travel easel near the carousel on Avenue Trudaine, I’m excited to replicate the paper-towel wash tonal perspective demo that Gregg just performed for us on his own canvas.
I decide I won’t use color today, because I don’t want to sacrifice that raw drawing energy that makes an image sing.
My first painting from Gregg Kreutz’ plein air workshop in Paris with the Art Students League of New York.
People stop by, I practice my French with them, I ask for clarifications in French, no switching to English. People express the joy they feel at seeing a group of painters spread out in the small area the 15 of us have taken over.
Gregg tells me I don’t need to overwork details all over the canvas; that I have a nice balance of large suggested areas and detailed areas; to finish the detail in the middle and sign it.
Thank god he tells me to go ahead and sign it. I’m used to hearing how dumb and old-fashioned I am to think I can still sign the front of my painting. According to New York, I’m supposed to sign the back of my painting and everyone should just know my work cause of the style, and how my signature throws off the composition. I feel very rebelious about this. Don’t take away the moment of satisfaction I get from finishing it with a signature on the front. What bizarre practice is this? “Composition” yeah right. It sounds like more nonsense to protect rich people from displaying who they’re buying.
Please.
Anyway, great workshop.
I’ve called this blog many things, but it’s just a blog and I like the word blog even though I’m told I should not use the word blog. I’m not supposed to sign my paintings either. Not on the front. Just the back. All these rules that take out the satisfaction. Am I being nostalgic about stupid shit? Eva, did you enjoy your years off from writing? Writing about self-importance, after enjoying reading someone else write about self-importance, might be self-important. A thought.
My desk is heavy brown wood sits perpendicular to an old third-floor window of Parisian charm. But in Brooklyn. I have two mansions, I tell people. for $700 a month. I think I need to stop telling people that because it makes them sad. It’s too dreamy. Well whatever I met a girl who said she pays $250 or $100 or $500 to live in Chinatown with all this studio space and I didn’t roll over and die. I felt like, if such a place exists for her, then such a place must exist for me. And here I am. There I was. There’s I’m going. I’m going to Paris tomorrow. And I’m going to paint in Venice.
I moved here for more space and because it is more affordable. My life is very complicated but I like to keep it simple. I need to. I’m a furnace and I’m a bomb and I have too much life force and I use up a lot of it keeping myself in check and being civilized and not saying what I wish I could say but you just can’t act like that. You need to save it for special occasions when it counts.
Dear Internet,
Last night I went to a party, and after enough wine and food, improvised jazzy Christmas standards on the host’s piano, because it was a belated Christmas party in March.
But before all that, late in the morning yesterday, I hopped a bus to Guitar Center for a second 1/4 adapter so I could record this bop.
Please enjoy my cover of Carter Vail’s cover of the Arthur theme song, written by Ziggy Marley.
Dear Internet,
December 2020, I was at the MoMA getting a green, yellow and blue French press for my mother shipped down to Florida.
They applied a discount and shipped it for free because I’m a member. A few months later, unprovoked, they sent her a second one with a blank invoice attached. How does that even happen?
She now has two big yellow and green French presses, so I suggested she take it as a sign and throw a small recurring party called The Accidental MoMA Breakfast Brunch. I flew into town and joined her for the first one.
It was a dynamic gathering and she sold a painting. Thanks MoMA.
All the best, Eva