Painting a Summer Holiday

According to Wikipedia the literal definition of a hobby is 'an activity or interest that is undertaken for pleasure, typically done during one's leisure time'.

I am an artist and luckily my favorite hobby is who I am and what I do. It's almost the end of a full filling and challenging year. I am a high school art and design teacher as well and things in the campus will be rolled up by the middle of June.

I am dying for the summer holidays. It's as if the aroma of turpentine and paint is pulling me to indulge...take out the brushes and spread my wings on the canvas. Scattered ideas, scribbled notes, lame thoughts are lying everywhere in my notebooks, diaries, books, my room and inside me. And summer is going to be their time to jump out and make some sense. For me - summer holidays are freedom in the absolute sense.

I don't like planning things too much. Everyday shows it's own track and I like walking on it as it comes. My first priority to get on with painting will be to order or make some canvases and shop for art material. I simply love that part, the art material shops in Anarkali bazaar, Lahore are an artist's paradise. Crude and humble in appearance like a hardware shop - they've every artistic delight and delicacy to offer.

After getting the material transforming my bedroom into a studio is the turning point. It hardly takes a day or two...take out the bed and bring in the bed-cum-sofa. Remove the hangings from the walls because the walls will serve as support for canvases or other surfaces. Put plastic sheets with tape on the floor, specially under the base of the canvases so that my loving, understanding and accommodating parents know that I care about our home!( Here in Pakistan we live with our parents until we are married - and for guys mostly, it's after they're married as well )

Finally comes the time for action. Pleasure attracts pleasure. I will live, love, go everywhere my art takes me, paint my heart out...and have a kick-start for an exhibition.
Thanks to the summer...