 |
| Red dahlias. 12"×9", Oil on canvas panel, October 2012 |
Another day, another painting to release...
I am beginning to cherish this little daily routine of looking through my catalog for a work to list on Daily PaintWorks today, and then looking for words to say about it.
Unlike many people in the "daily painting" movement, I don't release freshly completed works for sale. Partly, it is a technical issue: mine are oil paintings, without any fast-drying mediums, so they need time to be able to travel safely. But more importantly, I want to gain a distance from the painting process, to be able to look at it from the "outside", to put myself in the viewer's shoes. And sometimes this cooling period results in the painting going back to my in-progress pile, because it doesn't seem to fulfill its promise.
This one, though, I am ready to let go. I like its straightforward contrast between two bunches of dahlias in the bouquet: the more earthly treatment of the foreground flowers, with brushstrokes mirroring the movements of petals vs. the dissolution of their background sisters into fiery color, threatening to overflow the panel. The foreground flowers are earth-bound and about to lose their petals; not so with the background ones: these are, in Shakespeare's words, distilled and their substance still lives sweet.
Click here to bid...
2 comments:
I think it's a wise idea to leave time between creating and posting. The challenge with that is with every painting we learn and improve (or I hope that's the case), therefore if I leave more than a few weeks to assess I never see it as good enough. My buyers seem to have different opinions to me anyway so as long as I think it's up to standard I go ahead and post. I recently sold one I thought was spectacular and one I was ambivalent about. Perhaps I just need to pep up my selection skills.
I post pretty much everything on Google+ (including work-in-progress), I just don't list them for sale. If I don't think it's good enough in a few weeks, it just goes into sanding or re-work.
Post a Comment