...and it's not over...
If you aren’t aware, I document a ton of my process with paintings. Most of the in-progress photos don’t survive once the painting is done, but a lot do. What gets saved is a matter of my mood and how important I think the in-progress stages are. On social media, I’ll post works-in-progress, but usually just a corner of the piece and explain what’s happening in the caption. I used to show whole paintings at various stages, but I’ve come to realize that I don’t want to have a conversation online that’s centered around a work that’s not finished, yet. Studio visits, yes, but it depends on the work and how far along I am with the piece.
This painting began with some interesting color and form combinations, a mix of pinks, blues, and orange in the background, but I wasn’t convinced that it had reached its end stage, yet. I started it back in early August, I think, and and let it sit around for the past few weeks because I thought I was on to something and needed to let it “rest” a bit before I made some drastic change to the surface. As always, I have other projects to work on, so letting this one sit was no big deal. I let it go until last week when I started back in on it again. Let me tell you, it's been a wild ride. The most challenging part has been dealing with mostly color and form. At a certain point, in order to better see what was happening on the surface, I needed to rotate the canvas all the way around and even today, I turned it again and hopefully will now have the final composition down. Color has been a difficult ride with this one because throughout, I had a tough time finding tones that I liked and felt right for this painting. I’m feeling better about it now.
The hardest part has been not allowing myself to give in, painting everything out and starting again. I was determined to keep at it because I saw something there and just needed to keep at it. I’m going to continue tweaking things and hopefully, I’ll arrive at a good finishing place. I’m still kind of close to scrapping this and starting again soon, but As the work has progressed, I’ve come to like some of the changes I’ve made to the colors and the current composition (last photo) feels right to me.
TM