1st preparation for a residency

i’m going to be going on an art residency this coming october, ten months away. i have already begun planning.

i’m in atlanta, and they’re in kerry, the very western tip of ireland.

they won’t even let you buy an airplane seat this far out. it’s got to be within 331 days of the trip.

i don’t make any money to speak of. anybody with an actual job makes roughly ten to fifty times my gross income. burger flippers are rich compared to me. i survive because of the kindness of strangers, luck, and practice. i have to budget every penny to pay for tickets. that’s my tax return, and i’m going to be hoarding it. i’ve made my last purchases of beeswax and silk for awhile. no more art books.

it’s going to cost me $1500 by the time it’s over, and that’s doing it like the starving artist i am. the airfare is likely to cost a thousand, and there’s five hundred worth of supplies if all i do is eat beans and rice and scribble on newsprint with crayons. just the odd pint at the bar down the village every now and again is going to run me close to a hundred bucks. in three weeks? hell yes.

i’m going to be equipping myself at susie’s outfitters, a private boutique my sister runs. i will arrive in travel clothes and nothing else. i’ll get everything i could put on my body from her closets. she’ll supply all the bedding i can sleep under, robes, clothes, coats, hats and mittens. socks. towels. nice big fluffy ones. nothing i can get paint on, however, and therein lies the rub.

i will pick up any art supplies they wouldn’t let me on the plane with, like turpentine and linseed oil – the paint media, down in dublin at fitzgerald’s.

i’ll bring most everything with me. my dyes. my pigments, both in powdered form. my brushes. rolled empty canvas, watercolor paper, and silk and cotton yardage.

maybe some beeswax. maybe i’ll do an encaustic. the problem is that encaustic has to be held on a rigid surface, and that means i can’t roll it up and put it in my bags. it has to go flat. which means not many, and small ones if i do encaustic painting. i’ve been telling myself i wouldn’t do encaustic whle i was there, but i’m thinking of the plantlife i can embed in a painting. the gorse, the grasses, the moss. bits of stone cottage that have crumbled off, sand and pebbles from the coastline. seaweed. i can’t pass that up, can i?

on the way out to kerry from dublin, susie and i will stop and provision me for much of my time there. the basic food things like flour and butter, sugar, tinned milk, coffee and tea, guinness and jameson’s, root vegetables, beans, rice, yeast for bread. just like at home.

that means i’ll have to go down to the village for perishable vegetables, eggs, fresh milk, that nice cream pastry from the bakery.

i’ll have to go down there to use the internet, too, at the post office, and to have a pint or two and read or sketch or maybe do a painting of the pub, which i used to do a lot. i’ll include a picture.

slattery & sons, rathmines, dublin

i figure it will be easy enough to give jim written instructions on how to read my blog, and to write a comment on it, and that way we can keep in touch as well as phonecalls, which are expensive unless susie has a way.

and this is just the physical comfort side. what about the work? what kind of planning can i do this far out? how do i know what i will be in a position or mood to work on ten months from now? the way i’ve always done art is a little here and a little there, always several projects going at once, always a different stage of not knowing what i’m doing.

so i just plan on doing everything while i’m at a residency. pare down to the bare essential art supplies, take everything, because the bare essentials fit into a single bag, they must. i’ll deal with it. paint on rocks. on cardboard. on the fogged up window panes. i’ve left paintings on people’s walls. never found out whether they thanked me for it. all the best, folks.

at this point i’m already fantasizing a great deal of color, but no shapes are discernable yet. it’ll be full of rich grays and blues and greens, however, and brown grass and peat fires.

at this point it’s all fantasy. but boy am i excited about it.

reality check. i just checked aer lingus’ website, and they’re running rondtrip dc to dublin for 520. i can get to dc. the fare has dropped from almost $1100 to $860 at delta for a flight from atl.

what if i wait a while and see what happens to the prices. could be airfare will be reasonable for awhile during this crisis. i’ll enroll in some of those travel sites for awhile. i still make nothing, either way you slice it. so it kind of doesn’t matter. supplies and provisions are going to still cost, so it’s not like i’m going to cut it by much, but i’m grateful to be able to go at all.