Stage two...
oil going on over-top of the acrylic wash/underpainting
Both of the kids had play-dates this afternoon, so I was able to get to the studio for a couple of hours. I tweaked a few small paintings and then bit the bullet and began working on this one again. I have been thinking about it non-stop and how I was going to tackle it. Which makes me think of a conversation I had with a friend up at the Kenderdine Campus. We were talking about how people like to ask an artist how long it takes to paint a painting, likely because they are trying to determine how much the artist's hourly rate is! What my friend had said was that the answer is really 10, 20, 40 years or however long you have been studying and working at your art. I love that! You see, although I have only got about 5 hours of painting time into this piece (with many more to go), I began "painting it" the day I took the photo. It has been imagined in my mind already for uncountable hours. I have studied my paints to figure out what colours I would mix to get the effects I want. I have laboured over the composition. And now I am just scratching the surface with marks and dashes of paint. I hope it turns out... I am hoping I will be invited to submit paintings to an art auction again this year and I'd love this to be a show stopper... but if it doesn't I will undoubtedly have learned valuable lessons that will go on to inform my next paintings. And the time spent will go into the stockpile of hours that back each and every piece of art I continue to create.
I'm so excited about this one that I hope to burn the midnight oil at the studio tonight when I get through with a meeting. Fingers crossed that the feelin' is still there!
