Purchase and Photos

I will be posting updates and photographs of the work thus far created. The funny bit about working offline is the opportunities for online integration lost!

So far am essentially on schedule, and more on that later. Today want to discuss supplies acquisition and a brief note on style.

My sweetheart husband calls me a "poky puppy," and I guess he might be right. We were late going to our interview in Marion, about an hour away, for being regulars on a Cable Flea-Market and Barter Show.

But our contacts seemed cool about it anyway; since they came all the way from the Bay Area of California to interview partners-pursuing-flea-market-lifestyles within a couple of hours of Hickory, N.C., what was another sixty minute delay?

We were one of the couples that qualified to do a 'screen test.' Our Craigslist response sent in the Kickstarter video, so I got to talk about the Turner Project as something that will end up with a big portfolio for me, or a production that might have an overall value that is tangible--i.e., not just beauty but cash and prizes.

Ashley and Simon, the interviewers, asked me what I'd want to receive if we thought about bartering the whole set of renderings. When I didn't have an immediate answer--I was thinking about an ongoing relationship with a gallery or some other kind of agency process--Jim piped up, "We might take a car."

Simon nodded, "A car, uh?"

And Jim said, "Yeah, a nice car, worth a minimum of plus-or-minus $15,000." He analyzed this for them. Roughly a hundred paintings take a minimum of ten hours each, including preparing wood, doing the art work, and finishing the wood. That's a thousand hours. A grotesquely inadequate wage for skilled work, $15/hour is at least better than nothing. 100 X 10 X 15 = $15,000 or the aforementioned 'nice car.'


The KickStarter money lets us get the work done, financing our finding and cutting the wood; it gave me the ability to research Turner and his methods, and to plan out the whole process. We may not make our hoped-for $15/hour on the time invested, but at least we get something.

It also let me invest close to a thousand dollars in various supplies. When we left Marion, in fact, we headed straight into a basketball traffic jam in downtown Asheville--Jim says these people are as serious about basketball as Texans are about football--in order to pick up one installment of what I needed to be able to complete this process.

The tab at True-Blue Art Supplies, after a 25% discount that yours-truly ably negotiated, was almost $600. However, I got not only close-to-enough good gesso to prep the remaining seventy-six pieces of wood(Jim's already finished the first fourteen panels, and they are so cool!), I even got the fancy, 'old-master' primer base and a liquid goo to turn it into a special surface-prep for a few pieces that I want to be as close to possible to Turner's methods and results. I got 3 different alkyd mediums - goop - to try out which is best when it comes to glazing methods.

Not only that, I got some of the chico brushes that I'd worn out and the lack of which was really messing with my ability to do really top-level detail work. And I'm pretty sure that I obtained the rest of the paints that I'll need, including some great greys that I'm using on the piece that I started last night and am continuing now. I'll write about the grisaille methods that Turner sometimes used in an upcoming post.

As well, I got a set of palette-knives to supplement my one tetanus special that I'd been making-do with. And I got some cool chemicals to help seal and highlight oils. And I got most of the supplies that I'll need to fulfill the KickStarter gifts that we'll start sending out by the middle of the month.

I feel like I'm a marathon woman who can't stop thinking about ice cream. Jim says that he's already sad that we're so close to being done.

We're a good team. At least I know that, if we live through the Spring, we will finish. That's a real feeling of accomplishment.