I'm 99% finished with the prep work for my new painting (stretched, completely sketched in, primed and ground tint laid) but I've been putting off actually starting because while I have a very clear idea in my mind of where I want this piece to end up, I find I'm having trouble deciding where to begin exactly. I think this might have something to do with the fact that while I've got such definite ideas about the concept I also traditionally like to leave room for happy accidents when I'm working and so the difficulty is in reconciling THE PLAN with CHANCE.

So I usually work around psychological blocks like this by a. going on a wild de-clutter spree and 14. immersing myself in things that inspire me, visually or otherwise. 

So here are some things that I've been finding visually or conceptually intriguing lately and at the very end, some bonus drawings I did a very very long time ago that I stumbled upon while de-cluttering...

I should note I'm not going to cite individual work titles, but I will provide links to sources for these images. Also, many of them can be clicked through to see larger versions.

First we've got Ernesto Caivano, an artist I noticed through an article in one my absolute favourite magazines in the world, Elle Decor. I love his compositional use of positive and negative space, his highly developed personal visual language and well here you go...

  

 
So that's it. I thought I could get this post done in an hour, I pre-loaded all the pics and then some, but Bitsy (laptop) was SOOOO SLOOOOOOWWWW and I couldn't figure out why. I didn't even have much open, Outlook and several Explorer tabs, not even Illustrator. Then I checked the harddrive and discovered that I had slightly less than 2 Gigs of space left. How did that happen? I mean I off-loaded about 20 Gigs to the new THING (I've yet to come up for a name, it's a 300 GB ext hard drive) just last month. So this post took 4+ hours. Everything was molasses slow and meanwhile I offloaded a ton of stuff onto the unnamed thing. Y'know I think I'll name the thing Linus. I've always loved the aesthetic look of Wings of the Dove. Where did those Gigs go? The porn really adds up, eh? HEE!