Ginormous painting

So this was my conversation this morning with my father:

Me: Hey dad. So how easy would it be to transport a 6'x3' canvas from say, Champaign to DeKalb?
Dad: Not easy.

So there you have it. But eventually figured out something that might work so I'm going ahead and making two giant canvas stretchers tomorrow for my *dum dum dum* final painting of the semester!! Jeff totally only assigned us three paintings all semester and gave us like, five weeks for each one. It was kind of ridiculous but I'm not too hot on painting assignments now so I was fine with it. I'm so psyched for next year when i get to do my own thing.

Anyway the photos above are the inspiration for what I'm doing. They were both old and dirty and created by man and probably wouldn't even be looked at twice by normal people. But I'm a weirdo so of course I noticed. Now, I don't boast to be any good at photography but I think the staple pic is pretty damn good. I'm fairly proud of it mainly because I DO suck at photography and that photo doesn't suck. The other one . . . not so much. I mean, I can look at it and get what I need from it for the painting, but I showed it to my roommate and she was like, what? What is so exciting about that dirty window? And I know what I'm going to do. Not exactly, mind you, which is why the process is going to be so fun. But I know that it's going to be beautiful and full of depth. And I want to show that these layers of dirt that we create show the build up of the way we live. And sometimes we're too lazy to clean it up. I can relate to that. It's going to loose and about color and texture. I'm going to take some canvas and cut it up and run it through the sewing machine to create seams and maybe do some stitching into it by hand and be liberal with the gesso. I want that gesso texture in there this time which is why I'm not going to use the pre gessoed stuff. I'm going to honest: I love that that canvas is so cheap (aurora bleachery sells it for two bucks a pound) but it's harder to stretch and i LIKE the texture of the gesso brush in my paintings because it's all part of the process. I just wish that the aurora bleachery sold ungessoed canvas. That is literally the only thing that is making me use the gessoed stuff. The fact that it is so cheap.

Anyway I'm excited and inspired. I'm going to take a lot of pictures throughout the process to chronicle the process so it should be cool.

listening to: Josh Ritter--The Animal Years