While I'm on jury duty for a whole month! there won't be much painting going on chez moi, so for now I thought I'd post an older work that lurks around in the corner of the studio. Is she finished? I never could decide, so I'm resurrecting her to deliberate and figure out what exactly is bugging me about this one still. The blouse is flat, and the arms aren't finished. Does it matter?OK then, according to that, my workshop experience was a grand success!!Being willing to endure the emotional burn of failure is a prerequisite for improvement, since without it we are cut off from the wellspring of our progress: reaching, failing, and learning from our mistakes. As baseball Hall of Famer Lou Brock said, “Show me a guy who is afraid to look bad, and I’ll show you a guy I can beat every time.”
Left: underpainting, session 1
Since I have to post these with latest as most recent, this verbiage applies to the image shown, as well as the four that follow. I just finished a 5-day workshop with William Park, and I'm adding a link to his work over there on the right, case you want to check that out. His style is fast and loose, and I thought it would be "fun" and shake me out of my tree a bit. Well, it definitely did the latter... and I suppose there was a bit of the former sprinkled in here and there. Gosh, it's shocking how bloody darn serious I am and how not fun "having fun" was. Wow! What an eye-opener. Meltdowns every day, and a couple of doozies at that! Well, on the last day, I managed to do a couple of crazy things, but I was really surprised to find out how hard it is to get out of my groove--out of my comfort zone--and just let it rip. These are roughly in the order in which they were painted. I spent the most time on this one; a model in the fashion show at the Galeries Lafayette in Paris.
So, after my Day 2 meltdown, I just had to get back to something comforting. Flowers! Ahhh.... I can breathe again. I returned to this each day... this is as far as it got... I may continue with it.
Riffing from the previous post--about ugly, omg this started out the most freakishly ugly thing imaginable! So that version is buried under... oh, six or seven layers!!!
This was supposed to be a waste basket, but ended up looking like a paper coffee cup. My concept was that the flip side of "ugly" (top image) is "beautiful" (below). According to Bill Park, there is no such thing as an ugly work... you just have to keep pushing through and messing with it 'til you like it. So perhaps there is some beauty in my "shadow side". My loose and fun always seemed to turn out Ugly, and that's with a capital "U"!! Well, I'll hold the good thought that there's some good work on the other side of ugly.
