time

I did the math this morning on how long I have until POS. At first five months sounds like a lot of time, as in who knows what I’ll be doing by then, or as in think of all the amazing work I’ll have completed by that time. So at first it seems expansive and exciting.

Then I started to break this down into days and hours. Then I factored in my other jobs (writing, bookselling) and the fact that I will be moving into a house in June. That after having moved into said new house I will have a commute in order to get to my new studio. Now it starts to get depressing.

I worked out a whole set of estimates based on all these variables and find that I will have somewhere between 450 and 900 hours available to me. The most likely number seems to 750. I paint around 6 square inches per hour, so that’s 4500 square inches. An 18 x 24 inch painting is 432 square inches, so I might be able to complete ten 18 x 24 inch paintings in this amount of time. And this is and is not a lot of paintings. Since I currently have mock-ups that I’m excited about for considerably more than 10 paintings, not to mention the paintings I’m currently halfway through that will cut into this time, this is not a lot of paintings.
And that I know the limit of what I can achieve in the next twenty five weeks, that’s pretty oppressive. And I can kid myself that I will somehow become superman and work ten and twelve hours days and never see my wife or sleep, I know that this is not true. And not only that, but my currently probably and possible estimate of 750 hours will steadily become my most optimistic estimate as reality and all its contingencies interfere.