Almost There

January 25th, 2019

I’m so close.  I’m so close I’ve actually signed the paintings.  I still can’t let them go.  There was something about the third painting that just wasn’t quite right yet, and I didn’t know what it was.

This month, my focus, in general, has been on asking the right questions.  It’s easy to ask something silly like, “Why do I always do this?” to which your brain will answer, “because you’re a schmuck!”  It takes thought to ask the right questions, and the right questions are the ones that propel you forward in whatever you are doing.  The movie I Robot was all about asking the right questions.  Here was my dilemma.  I have this set of paintings.  They look awesome.  However, the large one just isn’t up to the level of the other two.  I looked at them on my phone.  I turned them upside down.  I went outside and looked at them through the window.  I turned the easel around and didn’t look at them at all for days.  I’ve been stewing in my own juices wondering what I’m missing.  Yes, I’m stubborn.  I wanted to figure it out for myself!  Since my theme this month is about asking the right questions, the answer was, obviously, that I was asking the wrong ones!

How can I look at this differently?  Since I’m focusing mostly on a drawing class right now, I decided to take my photograph and convert it to black and white to see what that showed me.  The subtlety of shading is far more pronounced in a black and white picture because the distraction of color has been removed.  Look what I found:

 

See how the smaller two paintings jump off the canvas?  The third one in comparison looks flat.  It is still gorgeous, it just isn’t there yet.  This is what was missing, the delicate shading that brings the other two to life.  Soon… I’m almost there!

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