To rewind the tape a little...Heidi was commenting on how much she liked a particular cityscape painting on the easel: the obvious brush strokes, its energy, how it drew you in and how much sky there was for a cityscape (as opposed to a landscape). I pointed out another painting sitting on the floor, of the same subject, but with a different composition (which was the first piece created of the two).
Not long ago, I posted to Instagram, an in-progress photo of the first piece, but only of a cropped detail of an area I thought more dynamic than the painting as a whole. As I lived and worked with the original piece, it did not have the vitality and energy that I had hoped for. It wasn’t cutting it. This should have been clue number one. Essentially, I had made a rookie mistake. I did not ask the question of myself, what drew me to the subject in the first place, why did I want to paint it? So, having figured it out the hard way, I started another painting in a square format that was essentially the cropped detail of the Instagram post. The second painting, in my mind, is far more successful in a lot of ways, than the first. I’ll let you decide if you think it is or not. For me, it flowed from my hands and brush with far more ease and joy.
The two photographs below illustrate this transformation.
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| Focal Point, oil, 24x18, 2016 |
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| Slip of Light, oil, 24x24, 2016 |
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