Wholesome Art Shit

I've spent most of 2022 so far painting on panels I assembled myself. As in, I get 1/4-inch MDF paneling cut to the size I need, I attach a wooden cradle to the back to keep it from warping, I prime it with gesso, and then I put an oil painting of a kittycat on it. I use poplar 1x2s for the cradles, and cut them with a hand saw on the world's crappiest miter box.

They're all a bit janky, because the miter box doesn't quite cut at a 45 degree angle and because I eyeball most of the rest of the measurements, but you fill in any gaps with putty, put a couple staples in the back for insurance, and apply as many layers of gesso as it takes to make it look nice. Get it smooth and blindingly-white enough, and it can pass for a store-bought one, as long as you aren't inspecting it too closely.

Initially I was nervous that the primer would peel off, or that anything I painted onto the homemade panels would flake off after a few weeks, or maybe just wouldn't stick at all. Surely it couldn't be this easy. There had to be some final step that could only be done at a factory, or that involved terrifying Renaissance chemicals. But nope, it turns out these panels -- the ones I don't really measure and just kinda stick together with wood glue -- are significantly nicer than the ones I'd been overpaying for. And if I paint the sides they look pretty nice hanging without a frame.

All of which is a partial explanation for why I've been offline. Not only that I've been busy sawing and priming, but because starting with a pile of lumber and ending up with a painting is a profoundly different experience from just filling up a blank canvas that you bought shrinkwrapped. It's not just that this occupies time that could be otherwise spent online; it somehow satisfies that abstract sense of need that sends us online in the first place. Whatever it was Nietzsche thought we had lost, the absense of which now defines our postmodern condition? Assembling art panels somehow makes me worry less about that.

Not a terribly helpful or informative conclusion, but everyone who's hanging out in these corners of the internet is looking for some escape hatch from, y'know, the nightmare of existence within our 21st-century memeplex. I'm not sure making my own art supplies will be enough to get me fully through the membrane to the next world, but _not_ doing that certainly wasn't helping.

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