An exciting morning

Scott Mutz and his team at Advanced Concrete Design started pouring the final concrete slab at 7 sharp this morning. Three inches of concrete in the entire casita (except the bathroom) and when they were done they about a half wheel barrow of mud left! Always exciting to see a large team work on a pour!

Crowded as the bedroom/office and the kitchen area is being poured.

More room to move around in the studio, at least for a while.

Getting more and more crowded as they are coming closer to the entrance door.

The pour is complete, two hours of hard work later. Now it has to sit a while before they can start working up the surface.

A lot of stuff happening

So much is happening and I hardly have time to update the blog.

Now stucco is being applied by Oscar, Daniel and Rodrigo. It is a joy to see them in action. It won’t take them long to wrap around the house and then they will do it once more with the final colored coat. That will be exciting.

Beginning to look like a Santa Fe house! This color is actually pretty nice, but we will have the usual Santa Fe sand color, anything else won’t be approved.

In the studio all vigas have been stained. Now we are waiting for the second slab of concrete to be poured, which will happen soon.

The studio from the other direction. The walls and the ceiling will have another coat of plaster, which will be white. We will try to keep it a bit rough, old style. The room beyond the studio will be the kitchen. I expect to install all the cabinets a few days after the concrete floor has been finished. Very fun and exciting.

Slow, but still moving forward

Back in Santa Fe, checking the progress and being involved in the process. Now more visible things will happen – yesterday the big window was mounted and the plaster team is prepping the walls. The outside is 99% done, soon there will be changes!

Kerry James Marshall, incredible painter

On our way to Santa Fe we stopped for a few days in Chicago. Very cool city! While there we went to The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and saw an incredibly good retrospective show with Kerry James Marshall. I had never heard of him, but now he is certainly one of my heroes! Fantastic paintings with a lot of depth and meaning. Very, very inspiring to both Andrea and me.

The last painting almost done

Painting number 11 in the new Family Suite is nearly done. Will let them all sit for a few days…

Searching for the perfect brush stroke

The other night, as I was brushing my teeth, I realized why I paint! I am searching for the perfect brush stroke! It is mine… nobody else’s. And no-one can say that it is wrong. If I find it, I want to try to get it again. Now I have only one part of the “family suite” left – my dad as a little boy. I have to say one thing: it may look easy, but it ain’t.

Seven almost done, four more to go

I am slowly making progress on the family suite No. 2.

The joy of falling!

A couple of posts ago I wrote about the art of falling. Now I can talk of the joy of falling… or painting. I guess one of my “advantages” is that that I am not schooled or trained to paint in a certain way and I always have to struggle and try taking unsteady steps into the unknown. I am never really approaching a face the same way. Today I found a color I have never used before and it worked well!

A roof!

Our dear neighbor Rolf Wallengren sent a few pictures. Now we have vigas in place and a roof with parapets coming up!

The art of falling

Creating art is like jumping of a cliff. I keep forgetting how difficult it is and how important it is to have faith. In the end something will come out of it all, it is just important to keep pressing on. I have taken up a challenge – to create eleven paintings in a different style than the same eleven faces I painted in 2009. My dad and all his siblings and parents. The first five have been started.