Last chance 2017.

It was a long night and I got some pretty decent sleep in patches. I stayed in bed a little bit longer this morning, but it really didn't result in any extra sleep. It was mostly just for thinking. The thinking that resulted wasn't all that productive. Therefore, I should just got up and five or six when I woke up pretty much for the first time.

I thought a lot about painting and especially the picture that I painted yesterday. The painting was of an imaginary scene in the forest, which ended up having a cabin in it. I have never practiced drawing or painting cabins, so this one looks kind of like the Lincoln logs version. I kept trying different things for the trees in the sky and they kept changing in front of me, but nothing I saw satisfied me so I just kept painting over and over and over and over. I guess I was going for some kind of a sunset sky. It was sort of a purplish red fading over to salmon on the sun side. I then painted a rim of reflection of that light on the trees on the sunny side. In the end, it looked like a forest fire, so I got frustrated, pulled out the palette knife started smearing the rest with leftover paints and the very end. It looked like a forest fire that destroyed a cabin. It was a pretty depressing picture so I just got done scraping the canvas clean with a putty knife. At least that part was satisfying.

Today is the last day of 2017. Tonight is New Year's Eve. Once again I have no plans or intentions of celebrating and I only hope that my neighbors can keep the firecrackers and gunfire down to a minimum, because it really scares the dogs.

I am going to paint again today. I've decided, at least for now, that I'm going to paint from reference pictures and only practice modifying my style. I'm obviously not to the point where I can make up a picture, even in the abstract. There's no connection between my imagining pictures that are at all executable and feelings that I would like to express. This is something I think I should work on. And for now, the best way I can think to work on that is to look at other paintings that are successful at expressing emotion. Maybe even look up some information on art appreciation. I've never really gotten into that and it's about time.

I can't really think of anything else I want to write down here today so I'll move on and get on with my day.

More later,

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