I haven’t blogged here for a very, very long time. The reason is that my husband and I have been in the process of moving to France for a long while now. After years of planning and making many trips to France to explore various cities and towns, we finally arrived last fall and found a great apartment in the heart of our choice of cities – Aix-en-Provence. But it took two more trips back to our house in Austin to finish packing what stuff we wanted to bring with us and what stuff to have shipped, and then to get our house ready to sell.
In the meantime, I haven’t had much bandwidth to paint, nor have I had much in the way of art equipment and supplies. I’ve bought a few things here, but wow! – the cost of replacing a lot of the brushes, paints, and tools that I have been accumulating over the past approximately 4-5 decades seems astronomical compared to what I originally paid for things. I don’t know if that’s more related to time or to place.
On top of that, except for a couple of cameras, all the equipment I usually use for photographing my paintings is in our shipment, which is due to arrive – oh, maybe next month. Most of my office equipment isn’t here yet, either. And I need to buy a new easel for painting on canvas.
I have a good-sized room with a great balcony for my studio/office, and I did get a worktable, a desktop, some drawers, and a really nice chair – all from Ikea, which luckily delivers. I still need some shelves and storage equipment, but I’m planning on waiting until my art and photo stuff arrives so that I can try to make sure I get just the right configuration of furniture in which to organize my art stuff.
I left behind many of my paintings, drawings, and prints in Austin. A lot of them got re-homed during our estate sale, some are at Top Drawer Thrift in Austin (sales benefit Top Drawer, not me), and I do believe quite a few got thrown away. I packed most of my favorites, most of my smaller drawings, and my sketchbooks. I do hope French Customs doesn’t have a problem with that, as we have a lot of blank wall space waiting to be filled.
As I chose to come here on a retirement visa, I am not allowed to sell or give away any of my things for at least the first year after our things arrive. At present, I do not plan to change my visa to a Talent visa, which would allow me to practice my art professionally, but I do plan on continuing to paint, because…how could I not?
In the meantime, I have done some sketches and small works on paper, my favorite of which is this small painting inspired by Lee Bontecou’s sculptural ideas.
