Painting Day

 A really cool thing about living with a fellow artist is the constant source of inspiration and encouragement. It's hard to live in a place called The Disco Castle without feeling inspired to dance and jive and put colours on a canvas.

My good friend, ex classmate, and current roommate Saija and I get together on especially creative afternoons and paint. She works in crazy neon colours and psychedelic subject matter, and I work in more of an abstract and landscape nature. I feel like Saija has more to say in the subject of her work, where I'm more concerned with the atmosphere of my paintings and allowing an individual to have their own experiences when they see my paintings.

Our styles are complete opposites, and I think it helps in our ability to grow as artists. To experience someone working in a nature so different from our own has pushed both her and I to try different things and work with our paint a little differently.

Some days we are blessed with warm sun and minimal breezes, and sometimes we get cloudy and buggy. But rain, sleet, snow, or hail, we will prosper!

To the right are pictures of one such cloudy day, but it turned out awesome in the end. Saija and I started on a collaboration piece, and all the other Disco Castlians joined us and chilled outside for a few hours.

There were laughs, there were chills, there were good vibes, and in the end there were a couple paintings I'm excited about.

It's nice to have painting days like these, but if we rely on big, inspired days like those, we'll be out of a job in a matter of minutes. Painting every day, regardless of the weather or the company, is the real difference between someone who creates art as a career and someone who creates it as a hobby. The amount of time you spend and the hours of effort you devote to your work, that's where the real art lives. And that's where I hope to be some day.

One day at a time.