What has/hasn’t gone to plan? What new questions have you discovered? Have your goals or aspirations for the project changed. Are you happy with your project thus far, both in terms of the experience itself and in terms of progress towards your originally stated goals?

The main thing that has not gone to plan is unfortunately something that both James and I saw coming. I work really slowly when I’m painting, mostly because I hate the idea of making a mistake, which is inevitable no matter what pace I’m painting at. Because of that I changed my original schedule from doing one painting at a time, to working on them simultaneously. By doing this I’m practicing something that James tries really hard to teach all of us, that we cannot be so precious with all of our work. I’m not going to reach perfection, but I’ll be able to reach a point where I’m happy with it, and if I’m working on them all at once, I’m working faster because I’m not stressed about having another time to do all three of the paintings and making them perfect, because that is physically not possible. I can instead focus on my technique, and there is no reason that I wouldn’t be able to continue to work on them once I return to New York. I am happy enough about where my project is, because I know that that I’m already pushing myself out of my comfort zone with the way in which I’m painting, and that’s something to be proud of, but I am also aware that in my original schedule, I was further ahead than I currently am, so having to adjust my expectations is a challenging thing that also so does make me feel a little bit guilty, even though I know how ambitious the original plan was. Another aspect that was foreseeable but I had not taken into account is that I am living on my own, in an apartment, and things are bound to go wrong. When I came back from Turin on Wednesday night the apartment was overrun with ants and I killed the ones that I found. However when I woke up the next morning there were even more. I set about deep cleaning the entire house, and found toxic bug spray that did a wonderful job of killing the ants, but also made me need to wear a face mask in my apartment for the rest of the day with all of the windows open to air it out. About an hour into my deep-cleaning, I lost power! I figured out that it was our entire block that had lost power and someone had already called it in. I resumed my cleaning the best I could and vacuumed, mopped and wiped down every surface in the apartment. By 5 or so I noticed that every other house had power again, so I was on the phone with the hotel that runs the apartment, who went back and forth between me and the technician, who was asking (in my opinion) really stupid questions, such as whether or not we flipped the switches that controlled our houses power (which are in a hidden cabinet). She said she would get back to us again, but did not, and eventually the power turned back on by itself. She is supposedly sending a technician over, because just before I sat down to write this, we lost power again!