Ok, so let’s get personal.
Yah, I know… Like I’m not already right?
I painted a really lovely painting this week.
A lot of people liked it. I showed it to a number of artists and to a person they gave it a thumbs up.
Thing is…it just didn’t move me.
Now you know me, I want to move! I want to look at a painting and smile and dance and twirl and say “‘oh yah, this is it!”.
This one was so close. But I just didn’t feel it.
And here’s the thing. If I don’t feel it, then I am not going to be proud to send it on to a gallery or a collector.
I am a straight from the shoulder kind of person, as you well know, and I don’t have it in me to put up a big front and tell you how wonderful a painting is if I’m not in love with it myself.
We artists are a fickle group. We always love our last painting the best.
But for probably the first time since I started painting, I painted a lovely new painting…and I didn’t love it best.
This has been something of a strange experience for me. I’m still trying to determine just what about it I didn’t like.
It was a different palette than I normally use. I am trying a few new colors.
And I did decide to try a “tetrad” for my color scheme. (A tetrad is a rectangle on the color wheel, of two sets of complimentary colors.)
Perhaps one of those changes was the culprit that caused my dissatisfaction.
Still though, the new colors produced some beautiful variations. And I think the tetrad worked well.
I noticed in a few of the last large paintings I really like what appear to be almost architectural lines that remained, so I added a few of them.
It was a lovely painting. But it didn’t pass my test. It didn’t move me.
So it will now become a lovely underpainting for a future painting.
Hopefully one I will love the best of all my paintings so far. ♥
Hugs ~ Cyd
