After the euphoria of my early March life drawing sessions, I found myself wanting to again be making a painting. The days were still long and dark, and I selected some dark objects against a dark fabric -- with some glowing colours beginning to emerge like the promise of spring.
Long-stemmed dried roses had been waiting in my studio for their time to shine -- keepsakes from a beautiful retirement bouquet I was given in 2010. As I went out to buy a brilliant fresh primrose to put in my little thrift shop flower pot, a title suggested itself: "Past and Present." The dark winter; the coming spring. Perhaps a symbol for this stage of my personal life.
Working on my last half-sheet of wonderful artist's paper, I laid in the basics of what I expected to be a rather serious painting.
In early stages, I began to develop the darks:
Trying not to bog down in my usual (and unfortunate) propensity to dwell on details, I continued along until I reached this point:
Here, about a week into my Very Serious Painting, I was coming to find it Very Seriously Boring. Shapes and colours just weren't bouncing off each other, and I faced the panel each morning with grim resolution.
There are several things one might do at this point. I chose the most exuberant: Wipe it out! I washed the whole thing over with a combination of its brightest colours.
-- and then I began again. I freed myself from the idea that this would be a serious important painting called "Past and Present" and just flung into it.
After another week, there was not much more I could do. Self-evaluation? Not a great painting, but those colours would draw my eye and I'd probably buy it -- if I found it on a greeting card rack. So here it is, with its final light-hearted title, "Greetings."
Sometimes it's best to just accept what life churns out. As the sage Lao Tzu said,
"Let life ripen and then fall. Force is not the way at
all."
There is an equivalent struggle in photography: the thought that a certain amount of editing (in Photoshop) could make something very striking out of a shot that seemed like a good idea when you took it but was disappointing by the time it was front and center on the computer screen. Sometimes A LOT of time and effort can be spent trying to accomplish that improvement, only to result in a half-finished (never to be finished, to be more accurate) photo file taking up computer space. And sometimes what you did first, before you edited the heck out of it, turns out to be pretty good after all! I hope that one of these days you'll return to painting those roses...
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