Gazing West

Gazing West acrylic on 6" x 6" board

I admire the daily painters.  They pop out acceptable works of art on a daily basis - seemingly with no trouble.  They are efficient and competent. I'm thinking of painters like Carol Marine in Oregon.  She is a wonderful painter and I love her work.

I notice that many of the daily painters, especially at Carol Marine's Daily Paintworks website, do tiny paintings. 6" x 6" seemed to be a favorite size, so there was a time when I tried to do the same. But I could never pull anything off in a day.  I am too particular.

Take this piece, for example.  This was a bit of an experiment - abstract in acrylic on such a small scale. Unbidden there arose a theme.  It seemed like the west to me, because of the colors, and I saw figures and, yes, a dog.  None were intentionally painted.

I did that fairly quickly, and liked the result.

Then I took a photo.  Somehow in the photo there was more depth and it was warmer in tone.  I liked the photo better.  The painting looked insipid.

So I decided to give the board a glaze of a transparent rose tint in one fell swoop and .. I hated it! Panic.  Ruined! I thought.  I was wearing rose-colored glasses!  I was in a bordello!

I had erased all of the variance in color that had made it interesting.

So then I started bringing those colors back, through some repainting and lifting.  I worked on it over a span of days until finally I abandoned it, thoroughly disgusted.

I believe it was relegated to a drawer.  Then eventually a shelf.  I would walk by it and evaluate. And, you know?  This wasn't the first painting, that I liked.  It was not what I saw in the photo that I liked even better.  But I like it.  I like the result.

I am going to paint larger.  I think if, no matter the size, a painting takes forever, than I may as well paint in a size that the market considers to be valuable. But I know the truth.  There is value in a small painting too, even it takes forever to make.