Doing what you don’t feel like doing. The most popular two formats, by far, in my online shops are the 30 x 24 inch oil on canvas paintings and the A5 size (21 x 15 cm) oil pastel drawings, so these are what I’m currently making. All my work these days is dedicated to building my e-commerce income to £70 profit a day. A modest amount by a lot of online traders standards but still way above what I’m currently making, and way below the general cost of living in London. I’m not complaining at all though, and am enjoying both the building and running of the shops, and choosing to let demand largely dictate what format I work in. I’m not totally given over to demand, as I turned down a commission to paint a pet dog the other day, but as far as what size or medium I work in, I couldn’t care less. Regardless of what I feel like doing, if I start doing something else, I soon get into it. One of my favourite sayings is “All you have to do is start”. Applicable to my music as my artwork. The hardest part about playing guitar is picking it up when I don’t feel like it, finding a plectrum and plugging it in. Everything after this is effortless. Same with writing this. It’s gone 1am and I wanted to go to bed a few minutes ago. The idea of writing a blog felt like climbing a mountain. Now if someone told me to stop typing and go to bed, I’d tell them to bugger off. Yesterday I posted the big paintings, so now it’s the turn of the small drawings:

So why bother writing a blog if I’m tired and it doesn’t directly relate to the e-commerce? Because much like the weekly BLACK IVORY PODCAST I do with @ronthroop Ron Throop and Emma Pugmire that we broadcast LIVE EVERY THURSDAY AT 7pm UK TIME on Ron’s Substack it helps put to bed all my thinking around work that’s done, and focus on what to do tomorrow. It’s good to know roughly what I’m doing tomorrow, the night before, as it means I can prep for it at night rather than waste precious daylight hours doing it in the morning. I don’t need daylight to paint, as many painters do, but I need it to photograph artwork that I can then put in my shops that evening. It’s frustrating sitting at my computer at night with a load of work I could upload into my shops, had I managed to get it photographed before the sun went down. I need to get lots of listings online fast as both shops are chronically understocked. The photos below are drawings from the video above.

This afternoon’s photography was all oil paintings of masks on A2 size paper (60 x 42 cm). I did these paintings over a year ago in oil and the paper I used wasn’t primed. Ron recently wrote about switching from unprimed to primed paper when using oil to ensure the painting survives long term. The mask paintings are only a year old, and I expect it will be decades, at least, before any real problems arise. Nevertheless, I’ll compensate anyone buying one by including another the same size, but on a primed future-proofed support. I’ll write more about this series in a near future blog.