Back to WALKING

Sorry, no photos. Today I rode the subway all the way downtown to Canal Street - and that's a LONG way. It is also the neighborhood where you can buy all the knockoff purses you can possibly carry. I was looking for Pearl Paint - one of the largest discount art supply stores in the world. It's kind of a mess and it's like, 7 floors and it's hard to go up and down all those stairs! I am starting to get this down - not one wrong turn to get there (knock on wood). I bought 5 giant tubes of oil paint because they were on sale for $11 each but I'm a little concerned because in the fine print it said they dried faster than normal. I wonder what they'll do in amongst paint that doesn't dry that fast? I have 3 more 4' square canvases to paint and figure I'll use it all before I go home.

After Pearl Paint (and no 4' canvases) I was directed to Dick Blick - straight up Broadway about 15 minutes. It's a crazy, rough, dirtier part of town but I did wander into the greatest Prada store you've ever seen. No, I didn't buy anything - I just took lots of notes about the finishes and flooring etc. looking for ideas for this old quick lube building we're turning into a restaurant. Half an hour later, I'm in a really nice Dick Blick store where I find 4' canvases for half the price I paid for mine. I've only picked up the first of the 4 so I'll go back there before class on Saturday and grab a new one, find a cab to drive us to class and then go to Utrecht and get my money back for the expensive ones I haven't picked up yet. Then I hopped on a subway and headed Uptown towards home.

I have found a great little hamburger joint - Goodburger - that's just a block from Barnes and Noble so I stopped there and ate a hamburger and onion rings then headed to B&N. Not much of an art book selection but I did pick out a book called, 'Painting Portraits' that has tons of color plates of very recent paintings of people by lots of different artists. There are so many ways to paint people and they are all so interesting - some pretty gross as well - but I am feeling like this is a great way to reinforce all the things I'm seeing and learning here. I am painting a live model in my oil painting class - 4 different paintings in all - so this will be a nice twist to my thinking! I just need to be sure and go back to the Frick and get that book on the drawings in the collection in the basement - those I want to copy just to figure out how they're done...