“This Sweet Simple Existence”- August 2026- A Year of Daily Painting
As part of my daily art project 2026, “This Sweet Simple Existence”, I am painting one painting a day for an entire year and at the end of every month I will be reflecting on my experience of that month’s daily painting experience.
August has arguably been the most challenging month of 2026 for the daily art project, “This Sweet Simple Existence”, simply because I was going to stop at July and I had no intention of painting daily in August. I really wanted to focus on my other project and also create more larger artworks in collections or series. Furthermore, I had run low on most of my paint colors and I had no more surfaces to paint on. But a week into August, I started feeling restless again and so I raided the entire house looking for anything to paint on, and I found in my daughter’s room an old set of acrylic paints that she’s never used and a couple of 9×12” canvas panels. So I thought I’ll do at least 2 paintings if not a whole month’s worth. The first two paintings were still life paintings based on a live demo by Not Sorry Art School’s series of “How To See Color and Paint it”. I did them using a palette knife which was really interesting, and the second one I challenged myself by doing with a limited Zorn color palette (using only cadmium red, yellow ochre and ivory black plus titanium white) since I did not have any cadmium yellow left. I realized as soon as I put brush to canvas, or in this case, palette knife to canvas, that I really can’t go for a week, or at the most 10 days without painting. Otherwise, I get really irritable. that’s what that restlessness meant.
But another few days passed and I was really resisting the urge to spend money on art supplies (since I had already used up even my daughter’s set of acrylic paints). Also, I was wracking my brain for inspiration and reference images. That’s usually the most time consuming part of painting for me, finding reference images or setting up my own still life etc).
My daughter was travelling with her father at the time and I had started going on daily walks, sometimes for an hour or 2 each day, because the house was getting too lonely. I was noticing beautiful flowers in full bloom around my neighborhood and walking route and I thought I would do a month of painting flowers, since I needed the practice. I took lots of photographs and then I finally decided to bite the bullet and run to the art store to buy the most essential paint colors and small canvas panels 6×6” and loose sheets of inexpensive acrylic paper. I justified the purchase by convincing myself that it was an investment and I need the paint anyways for future works. So I got to work and by the last week of August, I still had over 20 days of worth of paintings to get through. So I painted like a madwoman. The paintings were relatively small and I kept them very loose and impressionist, trying to mimic the imperfect organic form of flowers. I painted flowers that I observed on my daily walks, flowers that I had previously grown in my potted garden in my balcony and just flowers that I liked. With the exception of the first 2 paintings, August was an ode to flowers, but also an ode to my gardening days. I loved the looseness of the brushstrokes, which were more a result of limited time than conscious choice, but at least it kept me from overworking the paintings.
Once I could see the end of August coming, I realized that perhaps, I could get though the entire year., after all. I decided since August’s painting experience was challenging, that for September I would mostly focus on watercolor on paper, since watercolor requires minimal set up. I could literally be sitting on my living room couch, watching TV and painting on my lap. Once September was finished, I could do Inktober for October which is create one ink or pen illustration a day (again low stress and minimal set up). After October, there would only be November and December left. I was almost at the finish line, once August is complete.
All the paintings, with the exception of the first two still lifes (as they are not original) are available on my shop.
