Pumpkin carving! I made a robot pumpkin.

Picking color for a house is quite a different story than picking color for a painting. I found myself at a loss this weekend at the Home Depot paint chip section. 25 yellows, 25 blues, 25 reds, 25 what the heck, we finally settled on a beautiful shade of Tenderness. Yes, our paint is called Tenderness and we bought three gallons of its tender sweetness. On the way home from the store it suddenly dawned on me that Tenderness is the color of a new born baby boy's nursery room. I told Shannon that I thought we had made a big mistake and we spent the rest of the night, even dreaming about it, trying to convince ourselves that it really wasn't going to look that bad. On Sunday, we painted a test area on the wall and decided that if "not that bad" was our criteria then we had made a mistake. We decided to call this batch a total loss. Shannon liked the color of the original 1930s grey wall that was underneath the 1970s wood paneling. We ran back out to the Homies D for our second chance. They matched the color via their super-duper computer. The paint job is still in progress, but to date, looks great. We might turn our kitchen into the Tenderness room.

Here is a list of possible subjects I could write about today.

Pygmy Goats
Voting Republican
Home Remodel Burnout
Not Painting
Season Finale of Project Runway
Missy and Why She is Always Crying
Should We Have Babies
My Dad's Paintings Selling
Death and Why I Am Obsessed With It
Tight Rope Walking, My Soon To Be Hobby
One Of My Galleries Goes Co-Op

Fall has officially begun! I love it; something about the weather changing makes life exciting. Can you imagine if the weather stayed the same all year around - what drudgery! The heater has come on, and Shannon and I have cloistered ourselves in on Fridays to watch seasonal horror films. Children Of The Corn, 28 Days Later, Rosemary's Baby, The Shining, all greats.

This morning I took Missy out for a pee break. I could hear the wind blowing through the tops of the trees, bugs and bird were silent in the cold, and just the whispering branches and falling bright orange leaves made a sound. It is a good time to be alive.

Once in a long while we are lucky enough to come in contact with greatness. I am so glad that I decided to turn off HGTV and get my butt down to the Grey Eagle to see Damien Jurado. It was a small venue and a thin crowd, which added to my luck, because we were allowed to be close to the action. His music was like morphine, it brought me up and up, later that night, while on my way back down I was reminded why I am a painter and not a musician, music is too powerful. It gets me high and then drops me. Painting is stayed and controlled it has a steady pace which move me incrementally.

I have been thinking a lot about painting lately. I am not able to do any painting while remodeling the house, so I am left to just think about what I would be doing. I feel like I am at a small cross roads, I could pursue abstract work or more of the imagery I was doing just a few months ago. I have been a little torn on which rabbit trail to follow, but this morning I woke up thinking about my favorite artist, Martin Puryear. I am reminded of what I was doing back when I didn't care about selling work. I love design, abstract art just on the edge of something recognizable. Its tough to make work that is abstract in Asheville because most of those around me prefer realism, (which has to some extent pushed me in that direction). I think that it would be best for my work to make whatever comes most natural, buyer or no buyer.

I spent an hour last night at Micah Sherrill's FLickr site, http://flickr.com/photos/micahsherrill/. He has uploaded about 4000 pictures, most of them about art. This is valuable documentation of many great artists including himself working in their studios, as well as showing lots of great art and art events. It made me wish that I would spend more time taking pictures.