A Weekend (Mostly) to Myself

For all intents and purposes, I've got the weekend to myself, which is a rare thing.  Normally my son comes to visit every week, but he's visiting an uncle today, and tomorrow I have an event to attend to which I can't really bring him so we won't get together again until next week.

I owe my employer 3 hours of work today. Tomorrow, I owe 2 hours of work and there's the closing reception for my show at 29 Newbury.  The rest of the weekend however is entirely mine.

This is a painting I started about 7 years ago I think.  I was experimenting with projectors at the time and made this based on a photograph of a one of my very first models, who at the time I took the photo (maybe 13 years ago) was a long-time lover.  The photo I took at that time was originally used as inspiration for a painting I did for a class in which we were exploring impasto techniques. I gave that painting to her and still miss it.  It was one of my best paintings at the time.   In the photo, the shes laying on a large chair, so you'd have to rotate the canvas 90 degrees counter-clockwise to see the actual pose.  But because in the original painting, I'd decided instead to orient her the way you see her above, I decided to do the same thing again in this piece.  Perhaps in certain ways, I wanted the new painting to replace the one I'd given her.

For this painting, however, years later, I wanted to do something more "pop." I spent a few days working on this one, and then just got stuck.  Something wasn't right and I was never quite been able to put my finger on it.  I kept painting different things in the thought bubble and then painting them over, assuming the problem was there. For years.

What I recently came to realize though was that the real problem was the approach itself.  I was looking at this cartoony, pop image as some sort of ideal.  I was trying to make this piece one of a number of extreme deviations from my otherwise compulsive need to create deep, rich textures.  And this was wrong.

I have this great friend named Katie.  She's absolutely beautiful and utterly inspiring.  Lately, I've been having trouble painting and the other day, she came over to visit and I was painting again.

The piece needed more texture.  And color.  And it needed to be messier.  And darker. I also took Katie's advice to heart and reoriented the painting so this poor girl can finally lay down.  I have to fix the hair because of this.  No big deal.

It's not done.  But I've made significant progress.  What I think it boiled down to was that I had to start looking at the traced image as a blueprint- an underpainting- and not the ultimate realization of the idea.

So with my weekend to myself, I'm going to see if I can get some more work done on this without Katie around.  I'm optimistic.