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A friend and fellow artist, Jim Benest, recently posted two pictures on his facebook page. One showed a neat and orderly studio, with paints all lined up and brushes neatly arranged. The other showed what appeared to be a chaotic mess of paint tubes, brushes, rags, paper… “Hmm”, I thought, “That second one looks like my studio!”

It’s true. While I try to keep the rest of my house reasonably picked up, when I’m in the midst of painting, my studio takes on the look of your typical teenager’s bedroom. It ain’t  pretty. But (and it’s a big but, as my father used to like to say), there is a method to the madness. All the colors I am using are out and within reach (although I admit I have to pick up several tubes before finding “the one” I’m looking for) and the ones I’m not using are stashed away – which is a good thing as I’m prone to being seduced by a new color that happens to catch my eye, whether or not it actually fits into the color palette I’m using.

Speaking of palettes, while some artists neatly arrange their colors from light to dark, warm to cool, with uniform blobs of pigment, my palette looks like what’s left on your plate before scraping the leftovers into the trash. A mish mash.  Once again, there is a method to the madness.  And I do start out with separated colors – yellow, red, blue and white, sometimes black.  I sometimes have varying shades of the primaries on my palette, but lately I’ve been enjoying working with a limited palette, mixing all my colors from three.  The palette used on the painting currently on my easel consists of yellow ochre, naples yellow, cadmium red dark, quinacridone magenta, ultramarine blue and titanium white.

I’m not a total slob – at the end of a painting marathon – which can last for weeks or a couple months, I do suddenly “wake up” and see the mess. So I spend a few hours re-organizing, cleaning, throwing out – providing myself with a figurative “clean slate” to begin the creative process anew.

BTW, in the pictures you can see three of my favorite things in my studio – my little statue of Ganesha, who sits on my easel - my crooked wood easel, which my friend Carolyn found for me at Habit for Humanity – and my grandparents’ old porcelain topped kitchen table. I remember making  root beer floats with my dziadziu (Polish for grandpa) on this table when I was a little girl.

And of course, there's always the studio dogs. That's Jackson on the sofa, Serena on the rug and not seen in the picture - Taahlyn.