Are we there yet?
How many times have you heard your kids ask that question? Road trips and art- they both provide the perfect opportunity to display impatience. We have followed this image through three stages of its evolution from photograph to painting. That's my current goal, to begin to see photographs as information for possible paintings, not paintings themselves. I carry hundreds of images on my phone that I took because something caught my eye. Was it the composition, the light, or the subject itself? The danger ( and my oft repeated mistake) is to just reproduce the photo. I jumped into painting this street scene without asking myself some critical questions about composition. Our brains will accept and try to make sense of bad information in a photo, but not in a painting. The branches of foreground trees looked like snakes in the painting, the street light coming from the left cut the painting in half, the street in the foreground was weak and didn't provide the depth of color to "ground" all those tall buildings. Making all those changes has vastly improved this painting but it took twice as long as if I had recognized these compositional issues in the first place.
I feel like I should know these things by now. And I know my teacher is constantly amazed at how many ways I avoid immediate success. Why must I always take the longest road possible to finally arrive at my destination? Because boondoggling, or wandering around mindlessly, is characteristic of me in general. I go to the store to get a gallon of milk and come back 45 minutes later with three bags of groceries and an old chair I bought at the second garage sale I stopped at!
The moral of this very long story?
1. Using the same brain you use in your every day life can be hazardous to your art!
2. The shortest road to success in any painting is to follow the road map of good composition before picking up a brush!
