Hello, bloggers!

Rose and I are leaving our home in Florida for an extensive tour on many many different countries and numerous events.

In years past, I’ve always left my artwork in the Florida Keys, but since we’ve been having regular hurricanes and I never know where I’m going to be in different places around the world, I’ve begun having a truck come down and pick everything up and take it out of harm’s way to my other studios.

That happened today, four days before we were leaving, which is usual.  So I entered a completely empty studio this morning, and started rummaging around like a rat looking for something I could throw some paint on.  I found two huge stores of paper that were so heavy, you could hardly move it.

With great glee, I pulled everything off of it, and it was like finding a load of gold.  Then I thought, “What am I going to do with this?”

I decided I should staple it to the walls.  So now I’m surrounded by 70 pieces of huge paper from floor to ceiling.  I decided to staple some paper on top of the paper that was already there, since the paper I put on first would probably get stuck to the walls.

Next I looked around and found my big, pigment-encrusted wax crayons.  I had green and white, gold, silver, orange, red, purple, and ultramarine blue, in addition to black and white.

With great abandon I took all of them and started scribbling all over the walls.  It was great—brought me back to my days of left-hand, right-hand, both hands going like mad, different color in each hand...

At a certain point I stood back...  There were four huge walls, and I thought “Ah, this is fun, now what?”

I got out one of the rollers and sticks for the rollers and found an old melange that I pried open.  And here was this gold, white, yellowy paint, God knows how old it was...  The linseed oil on top of it had turned into this great unrecognizable clot.

So with great gusto I painted the whole thing with that paint, which of course interacted with the pigments and the wax and started running, to my delight.

All of a sudden I realized I was tired as hell, had been fooling with this for 6 hours, so I turned on all the fans, went home, and went to bed.

When I woke up, I went back to look at it.  Then I got out my regular paint that Jack Basso makes for me, the magic elixer of my art.  And I put in linseed oil and stuck them into these pots of paint, 7 different colors, and started slopping them on this great massacre of these 4 walls, watching as everything swirled and dropped out.

Then I got tired again.  “Lamb,” I thought, “you need to get out of here before somebody find your skeleton lying here!”

So since then I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to do for the next two days.  I have plans to squeeze Windsor Newton on it, knowing that the different elements of the melange will have resolved their problems by the time I come back.

I find these times just like a child:  learning what I’m going to do with the sand and water when I arrive at the beach!  It brings me back to the beginning!  I love it, I live for it, it gives me great joy!

People ask me, “Where do you go for your vacation?” and I always respond:  “To my studio, where the siren is calling me to drown me in the running colors and pure chaos and the work of the Spirit is sucking me in and spinning me around like a top!”  I don’t know where I’m going to fall, and frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn!

Matt