Process

Nothing is ever over, if you're a certain kind of person. One of the things I've learned about painting (and one of those things is not how to actually paint, ha ha), is deciding when something is actually done and finished. My general rule of thumb is that, if I can visualize it in a frame, then I can usually stop. Some paintings come right out and they're ready, almost like magic. Others seem like a total disaster and I wonder what to do with them, and I just keep painting over and over, scraping and worrying at them until I discover what I was looking for. And some just hang around, waiting for me to come back to them when the time is right. Here's one I've been working on for a little while:

This isn't what it looked like originally. At first it looked like this:

And I hated it. So I just covered it up. Then it looked like this:

I still hated it, so I added more cover up. The first one in the sequence is what it looks like now. I still don't like it, and I'm sure I'll keep adding to it. I have some ideas. But what's interesting is what happens if you take the digital image and zoom in on some of the parts you do like and extract them into their own stand-alone images. I'm sure there's a word for this, but I don't know what it is. Here, for example, is one segment:

Isn't that much better? And here are some others:

I like all of these a lot, and I may just make them into prints, while I continue to mess with the original template in real life. Of course, everything is over eventually, but some things never quite feel over. Painting allows for that process to play out without any consequences except a continuing unveiling of what it is that I was trying to say, and sometimes the answers are quite surprising.