Who am I, anyway?

 This has been a busy summer!  I've had lots of opportunities to share and show my art.  

Good, but keeps me out of my studio more than I like.  It's always a delicate balance between producing art and promoting it.

   I'm finally beginning a new series of paintings that will depict urban street scenes.  This is the first painting and as you can see it's not done.  How do you know if a painting is done?  A good friend told me if you can identify problems in a painting, and you know how to fix them, you are not done.  I'm pretty good at fixing problems by now cuz I've made lots of mistakes!  It's identifying them in the first place that's tricky.  You can stare at a painting you are working on for hours and simply miss what's wrong.  That's where belonging to a good critique group comes in.  After seeking good counsel, these are the problems I've identified.

  This painting had some branches that were distracting because of the angle they were hanging, so I removed them.  The dark values were too strong, I muted them. There was a street light beam that cut thru the middle of the painting from the left in the trees.  That had to go!  Now I'm down to some issues with the cars and how dense the traffic is, and the way the street looks like it's falling straight down from the cross walk.  This creates an unsettling precipice effect.  A little stronger color in the foreground might be the pop this painting needs as well.  Much left to do.

   How does this relate to my identity as an artist?  I've worked on such varied subject matter- portraits of people and animals, still lifes, florals, botanicals, neon signs, landscapes, and now buildings...will there ever emerge something that defines my work?  I don't have the answer to that.  My watercolor teacher says- in the full bloom of an illustrious art career- that she doesn't think anyone can truly know that.  She says she doesn't even know that herself.   Maybe we will just discover what we love to paint!  And maybe knowing that will set us free to indulge ourselves in just painting what we love.  What would galleries look like if they were filled only with artist's most passionate subjects?

    I was recently challenged with this question,  "What makes you different than all the artists you know?  What makes your work stand out?"  Then I am supposed to make a list of qualities that make me different.  I'm still working on that list but it's a question we all need to ask ourselves.  Then, once you know some of the answers to that, how are you showing that uniqueness to people who view your web or blog site.  Deep, huh?  And you thought all I had in my head was colors :-)