Things are going sorta semi-slow, but not as slow as I have complained about in recent weeks. In fact, I think I might make the deadlines. I think I might, I think I might. Or is that, “I think I can I think I can?”

Whatever the saying is or positive reinforcement I should be affirming to myself, I need it to happen or else it all goes up in a big fiery ball of flaming poo — which might prove to be an even better exhibition for all I know. But I would like to keep from finding that out.

So alas, I have been working on the last of the paintings as much as possible. The plan is to complete six before the show is here, but that sixth one might be a little tricky.

Right now I am working on four at once.

The one I call Drum Lab is at this state now:

As you can see I’ve made a lot of progress on this one. Tomorrow I plan to finish everything but the sky – so all the rest of the plants, grasses, rocks and pebbles should take up most of the day – but not all of it. I will also be working on these two that I am calling Baseline and Sierra:

And then there’s the bigger 36 x 36 inch panel that I think I’m just going to title Round House. This is not a great picture of it, but here is the progress on it thus far:

It has a little ways to go, but I think it’s come a long way from this:

It takes time to stick down the fabric pieces on all of these panels, but on this one it took a lot of extra time to do the background fade (from white to dark brown) after all the pieces were already stuck down. Although, I like the challenge of doing stuff like that. The same goes for painting the background of rocks around the drum set in the first one. That takes a tiny little brush – which reminds me that I might want to redo all of the cymbals on that painting since I just made simple white lines on them for light instead of going all out and fading light into the brass. That seems to show “laziness” when I was just being kind of tongue-in-cheek there.

But then again, who really cares? Is that really going to make or break the painting? I really don’t think so. Maybe I’ll just leave it be.

Okay, so that’s four of the six. Not bad in terms of progress, right? Give me two full weeks and I can be done with all four of these easily.

The fifth one is a small, 10 x 10 in birch panel that will be mostly fabric rectangles that won’t actually take a lot of skill, just a lot of craftsmanship – ha! Like pretty much everything I do! My work requires little talent folks. It’s just a lot of attention to detail and craftsmanship. I am only being honest. There is some skill involved, but it doesn’t take Leonardo da Vinci.

The 10″ x 10″ can be done whilst I do the last one, but the last one, the sixth one, will take a good four to five weeks time. That means it would still be wet at the time of the installation, so I would have to save it for the “back room” and it would not be in the main exhibition. Shulamit‘s back room is more like one of their lounge rooms upstairs.

Have you ever been there? There are quite a few floors with several rooms off the staircase on each floor – both offices and lounging rooms, plus a really posh patio lounge on the rooftop with a lovely view of the ocean. It’s a really beautiful gallery.

I imagine the sixth painting would hang in one of the lounges upstairs after we install the main show on the first floor.

I’ve had several ideas for the last painting, and I’ve been drawing and redrawing it. I take some of the drawings into Photoshop and play with them in there, and this is a basic foundation for what I might be doing for the sixth painting, which already has a working title of ACM VI (Apollo Command Module Six).

Something like this idea. Not exactly of course, but something along these lines.

But we’ll see what really happens.