Continuing to Paint While Waiting for Paint to Dry

Worth Keeping

That season Jackson Pollock finished thirty-two paintings.
Thirty-two sounds like a lot to someone who made fewer.
Paint only dries so fast and you can’t budge a wet canvas.
When you can’t move a drying artwork, you must wait.

My grandmother had one oven and only four bread pans.
She also had six pie tins. There were decisions to make.
Would she make six pies or four loaves of bread?
Her pies brought a higher price. She needed the money.

Does it really matter whether you paint or make pies?
If you must sell them to live it matters a very great deal.
For many reasons it is wiser to bake a delicious pie.
If no one buys the pie you can always eat it yourself.

If you paint you paint for yourself with perhaps that
Hope someone will come along and give you something
With which you might purchase a whole pie or slice.
Yet, you paint for yourself otherwise you should be baking.

Finishing thirty-two paintings in a season sounds like
A slow month to me. How many did he sell?
How many were worth keeping?
Paintings keep longer than pies.

(Above images of works on handmade paper from 2018 made in The Cloud Studio. These 22" by 30" paintings/drawings on handmade rag paper were created while my excessively, unnecessarily large seven by fourteen foot canvases were drying on the studio floor. The painting I stand in front of is a portion of a fourteener.)

By the way, there is no up/down/right/left when the painting is on the studio floor staring at the ceiling. There is only north/south/east/west and they matter even less.