Space/Time

Oil on Canvas

40 by 48 inches

After five long weeks, my husband returns from Pakistan. He brings paints, palette knives, canvases and three custom-made canvases, offers to cook for the foreseeable future and collect the kids from school and their various activities. All this means that today, Monday, the significant and magnificent first day of the new week, I have space and time to paint.

I arrive in my studio (basement, actually) with a plan in mind. But light shining through the slats of the garage onto the canvas suggest a simpler (or perhaps more complicated) design.

Blending new paints with old, using new strokes on a canvas I recognize as belonging to a former life, I am infused with joy, energy and excitement. Then I get paint everywhere and spend an hour cleaning up, desperate not to walk paint through my (relatively) pristine townhouse.