Energy Study, 16 x 16 inches, acrylic on panel, ©2010 Deidre Adams

Just noticed that it’s been almost a month since the last post, so I thought I should do a quick update. Here’s a painting in spring/summer colors to introduce a tangentially-related topic.

I have a big birthday coming up this year, and I decided what I wanted was a new house. Since that was completely out of the question, the next best thing would be to finish up some long-dormant home improvement projects and also to paint. Several years ago, I painted the family room and the dining room with some rather bright colors inspired by Mexico and a particular restaurant color scheme. This was a triumph of wills for me, as my husband would much rather see colors that have “resale value.” Once it’s done, though, he no longer notices.

We also have a “living” room – that seldom-used room that designers of modern suburban houses always seem to think we need, although I’d much rather have a bigger family room and do away with that complete waste of space. The room spans the two stories of the house, so I wanted to make it look less cavernous by dividing it vertically with different colors of paint. I did several very large patches with test colors but didn’t like any of them, and there they stayed as utter paralysis set in, probably for about 5 or 6 years, I don’t even know for sure. I stopped noticing, but I’m sure all my friends thought I was about the laziest person on the planet.

So I don’t know if it was the advent of spring, the start of a new phase of life, or just the fact that I was maybe a little tired of explaining to people just what the heck was going on with that crazy wall, but I finally got a fire lit under me to change it. And I couldn’t do just that room, I had to keep going and attack every white wall in the house. (I just do not like white walls, even though they do make it easy to coordinate artwork.) So for pretty much every day for the last three weeks, I’ve been house painting. Not as much fun as art, but satisfying in its own way.