Decidedly not the same thing....

Preparing to paint - research, designing, Photoshopping, gridding, drawing - is not painting.  Buying art supplies and attending art openings is not painting.   Blogging and feathering my website is not painting.  Since finishing my current show at Winston Wächter and tossing off the small nude that's in the group show at Froelick, I haven't actually painted anything.

There isn't anything to paint.  I'm in the planning stages of several paintings - the beginnings of a whole show, really - but that doesn't give me any of the kind of satisfaction I get from being in the process of actually "building" a painting.  Putting stroke upon stroke of paint upon the panel.  Finishing each little section, moving forward in pictorial space.  Until some paint goes down onto the panel's surface, it's an idea, but it isn't a painting.  And I have nothing I can put paint on.

I used to whine constantly that it was sooo hard for me to just settle down and sit down to paint.  I was too nervous and scattered and dreaded the necessary intense deployment of concentration.  I could squander hour after hour, though, fussing with all the other parts of the art business that aren't actually painting.  And now?  Everything is reversed.  And even though I'm very frustrated over the dearth of paintable surfaces here in the studio right now, I'm very grateful for that reversal.