Painting is a Dirty Job!

I've been watching a lot of the show "Dirty Jobs" (I think it's on Animal Planet, for a few hours during the day, not that this show is really about animals but its better at least than some of their other shows that have nothing whatsoever to do with animals...but that's not something I'll get into tonight!)  I've never really considered painting to be that dirty, it's practically spotless when put next to some of the stuff Mike Rowe has done!  Yet tonight while trying to finish a painting, I'm reminded of just how messy it can get.

I got up from my easel to wash my hands before getting something to eat (oil paint is toxic, not like kill you toxic, but its at least make you really sick toxic, the fumes alone will make you crazy if you breathe it enough over a long enough period) so I go into the bathroom, washed the big paint streak off my arm, then found this...

...Nice.  At least I didn't walk out in public!  I'm reminded of being in art school and for us in the painting suite, it was pretty much assumed that we all had paint on us all the time.  We just ignored it, there was no use in trying to keep ourselves clean.  But we did at least try to warn each other before we left the studios.  One day, I was sitting outside the building when a fellow painter come out with paint of her face, I told her, and she thanked me said that she thought we had gotten so used to seeing paint on our faces that we just stopped noticing!  

I think that's true...and I have no idea how I got this on my chin!