I talk a lot about palettes and supplies.

My studio palette as noted in a previous post is a big slab of marble that I love to work on. Years ago when I was just starting to paint I bought a folding black medal palette for my watercolors. Eventually it turned into my travel palette because it folds closed to protect the paint, and it’s medal and sturdy. It would take a lot to break it. After using it successfully on location in Ireland several times, Italy a couple times and France, I have grown sentimental about it. The paint boxes come and go and there are a few artists using old paint boxes of mine (it’s good karma to pass things on). But the black palette, I just show it off and explain that it is hard to find them so well made these days.

My students show me the palettes they have bought recently and it’s so sad the supplies the major art companies are putting out these days. It is hard to find goods so well made that you can keep using it for years.

Recently after teaching a class at the Cape Cod Art Association, I put away the last of the easels said goodbye to everyone and began to load up my jeep with my gear. But it was cold and rainy outside so I decided to move the jeep closer to the door to speed things up. I didn’t think twice about that bump I rolled over backing up to the door…

Till I saw that it was just MY PAINT BAG!  With my life in it.

I carried the flattened bag back into the studio to to see how much that smooth move cost me. The cell phone was unharmed, the digital camera was unharmed only the large tube of white squished out all over everything. The paint box was crushed, unusable. The medal palette got the worst of it. It was dented flat and would never be the same. I am still using it, but it is kind of limping along now, not sitting flat, not closing tight,  the one piece that will never be replaced , I will try to use a little longer.

So I like to tell this story though, because You know it was a good class and “I have it so together”, and then I run my jeep right over the tools of my trade…so smooth. Kind of brings you back down to say hey…watch what you are doing, look where you are going. Open your eyes Loretta.

So telling this story the other day in my printmaking group, my teacher Bev Edwards gleefully said that she had an old paintbox filled with tubes that she has not touched in years, and that I could have it. Music to my ears. You know why? Because they made things better then.

Before I ever saw her old paint box I knew it would be better than anything I could buy new. And it was and it is and i love it. It’s a big boy. Just the other night painting at home I had a tube of paint, squeezed it out on the marble and flipped back across the studio hitting the paintbox across the room easily. It is big. Sturdy. It will hold several paintings, a large palette and I think my small transistor for the spring on-location work. But the big surprise was that half the paint tubes are still good. I am using them and I can tell the quality is superior, the pigment stronger. As an artist it is often the little things that turn out to be important. The little things that will give you an edge, or hold you back.

Grumbacher and Windsor Newton are dropping the ball. Somewhere along the line they have compromised the materials they manufacture and decided to cater to the amateur market. I can’t control that.

All I can control is my product, my art. And I take pride in using the bast canvas, the best frames, proper techniques that will keep my paintings’ colors  strong and true,  long after you and I are gone.

Because there are so many ways to go wrong, and look foolish. It’s like standing on the first tee trying to keep your shot in the fairway with a crowd watching.

As I set my press the other day, lining up my sheet of paper to press into a mono print, I noticed my heart pounding and a slight shake to my hands and it felt like I was teeing up… thinking to myself, talking to myself, now don’t pick your head up Loretta, don’t try and kill it. Just nice and easy like Freddy Couples, right down the fairway. Only I was not on the fairway. I was hovering over a sheet of paper and plate. Taking my time, lining everything up as well as I could, guessing on the press setting, guessing on everything…like picking the right club and the yardage to the green.

Only I am an awful golfer.

To three-putt the green is not unusual to me. To lose a few balls to a neighbors yard along the fairway is par for the course so to speak. So this printmaking to golf analogy makes me uncomfortable, it makes me edgy. For a painter, so comfortable in the studio or on location, confident and self assured, it’s been a long time since my heart pounded with fear as I readied myself for creating. Maybe this is why I love printmaking so.

Someone told me recently that in China they use the same symbol for success and failure, because that line is so thin most of time. If you are creating art and you are not sure of how it will come out, than that is an exciting and dangerous way to work. That is the arena I want to create in. Let the paint drip. Let the paper slip. Turn the music up and take a chance.

This new monotype “Le Deux Margots, Paris” is one of two new prints selected for the

20th National Print &  Drawing Exhibition at The College of Notre Dame, Maryland, March 24-April 23, 2009.