Shipping to London

My shipping guy's name is Andrew.

I email him with the What Where and When. He replies with the How Much and Crunch.

The Crunch is the time we arrange for him to come and make the collection. To explain, I really hate handling my prints; they're so easy to damage and if I do, I'm letting down a whole string of people who have or are scheduled in to be part of the job to make sure it successfully navigates all the little obstacles that pop up between "start" and "finish".

Ideal Brown's family talk about throwing money at a problem: If you chuck enough dollar at something, it will usually stop being an issue (like AIDS). This is obviously a luxury for people who have dollar to throw around. It's something I've picked up on but only works to a point with prints. Suffice it to say, there's no other or more able bodied "me" I can pay to check and sign the edition. There is however, someone more capable of packing work for a shipment; and that's Andrew.

I want to know that I did everything I could to prevent a canvas from getting damaged in transit and that's paying a professional to do a job I'd likely fuck up.

This morning The Crunch spanned 8am to 10am, when Andrew arrived to collect four canvases, due to be sent to Black Rat Projects for my show with them next June. The hours leading up to The Crunch are when I paint the sides of the canvases in acrylic, so they look all clean and decent and presentable.

While they dry, I have to sit around and wait. I can say with the utmost confidence that the worst time to notice something you're unhappy with, is in the last two hours you have before it gets sent away. I might be able to work fast enough to rectify the situation, but oil paint will just never dry that quickly.

I hate The Crunch. It's a drawn out yet frantic slice of time in which I think about how dissatisfied I am with my own ability as a painter.

But then Andrew arrives and I can't say "do you think this is too shit to send?" because there's no more time left for dithering and most likely, a fuck is precisely what he doesn't care to give.

So anyway, that was my morning; I sent off four canvases. Now I can relax; there's still time to GET BETTER and I don't have to stare down my own work anymore.

One time I awoke at 4am to find all four canvases crowded around my bed, watching me sleep.

Here's the next one on the way: