Deja vous

I have a pile of failed paintings in my studio.  Old friends that just didn't quite cut the mustard!  What causes a painting to fail?  Bad composition is the main culprit.  I'm famous for becoming so enthralled with rendering a subject that I don't recognize the flaw until I'm done!  Sometimes just a lack of control of the medium or your materials.  Life is too short to use cheap materials.  A bargain on paper, brushes, or paint can turn into a disaster. I have finally been painting long enough to know what works best for me and I stick to that.

Why keep the fails?  Sometimes you can find miniature paintings in a failed composition.  Run a small mat over it until you find something in that window that has fresh appeal. I recently did that with this painting of Pansies.  I painted this on Arches 300 lb. Cold Press and could not get the texture and the rigidity to work with my style of painting.  The composition didn't lay well either.  It's been in my studio for a year- and pulling it out I had fresh eyes to evaluate what went wrong.  I took the scissors to it and got two delightful minis from it.

   Next, I decided to try the painting again, this time on 140 lb.  Arches paper and with a years experience behind me, produced a more successful painting.  Pansies make me happy.  They have little "faces" that always look like they are smiling at me.  You would think painting the same thing again would be boring but it wasn't.  It flowed so much better and I felt like I was saying hello to an old friend.  I painted it almost in one complete session (of course I stayed up till the wee hours of the morning with Chick flicks on the TV to keep me company). 

The moral of this very long story?  Don't be afraid to give a painting a second chance.  You'll be surprised at how much your skills have grown and who doesn't need a do-over now and then?