I've not painted much in my studio this past year, it's mostly served as a project staging area, geek's cave and construction zone. My plans for the studio in 2005 feature gesturing from slow motion video and painting large canvases with slow drying acrylics.

Gesturing from slowed video is powerful. Video of a moving figure is played in slow motion so that each frame stays on the screen for about 5 to 10 seconds. For each frame of video I execute a rapid gesture with charcoal, pencil or Wacom tablet. An hour of this is pretty intense. With my growing library of phenomenal dance and a video projector, I can take this technique to the next level.

Gesture feels right because the flow and sweep of the line is fantastic, especially big. When I was following Nicolaides 3 hours a day, I papered a hallway with radiant gestures and my growth was phenomenal. Shamus Culhane was right, one can become very quick.

As a foundation I know I can count on gesture. Anthony has suggested a route for taking gesture farther, so this practice jives nicely with his system. Even if I take nothing else from our association, he has demonstrated how gesture might be extended all the way out and that's a revelation.

I am also looking forward to large canvases (minimum 6'x 11') and slow drying acrylics. Painting big canvases is dancing with color - huge whole body strokes - it's a lovely fusion. Plus big is beautiful, it's immersive. And isn't selling big canvases the holy grail? Couldn't I be very happy doing just that? You betcha!

Big canvases pose an interesting engineering challenge. How to rapidly stretch the canvas without staples and such? The stretching should be temporary so finished work could then be photographed, rolled up and stored until sold. We could skip the stretchers and just hang canvas loose, but that's not a friendly surface for painting on.

I see a stretcher frame made of pipe with some sort of flat clamp system - squares of plywood and bolts and wing nuts that clamp to the canvas, with rope woven back and forth under tension. Kind of complicated, is there something faster and simpler? Googling was a wash. Stay tuned.