February 21, 2020

Informed the people who now own Phil Mechanic that I’ll be moving out. I’ve chosen nowhere to move to, so this will represent a hiatus in my life as a visual artist-- Maybe the end of it, but we’ll let that unfold as it may. I tested myself by imagining that the building had burned and I lost everything there– would I miss it? The answer was “no.” Even if I go back to painting, I wanted to make a clean break and start again, which would be hard to do with fragments of my old vision haunting me from the walls. How long have I had a studio? I painted at my house for a couple of years until I opened the Urthona Gallery. My journal for 1994 is, curiously, lost (it must have been a horrible year), but that must have been the first year I had a studio downtown. I moved to the Phil Mechanic in September 2006. This change had been agitating me for a while. Can I afford the outlay in retirement? I’d long since given up the idea that my artistic endeavors would pay for themselves. Best get all radical changes done at once and move on. Will I miss it? Who knows, but what has been ended can begin again. I hiked before I painted, and almost never hiked afterwards. Maybe I’ll hike again. Right now I begrudged time doing anything but writing.

The notary was just here to close the book on my refinancing. After all that, I save $100 a month. The Notary says, “Yes, but that $1200 a year!”