Starting Over

After more than six hours on a watercolor portrait that did not capture the likeness, I gave it over and covered the image with acrylic paint. I love the squirt bottles of Lukas paint I bought last year. They make it alarmingly easy to make a mess in a hurry. Five minutes was all it took to bury six hours of watercolor painting, leaving not a trace.

Then this evening I took a jar of white and painted out everything that I found irritating or ugly, things that would interfere with any image emerging.

Next I'll look for what this wants to be.

This is how Foxwood and The Storm were painted. It's like how I imagine scuba diving - a trip through a different element, silent, colorful, disorienting sometimes. Patience and daydreaming are the most important parts of this process for me (I understand that daydreaming is dangerous when scuba diving, so the similarities go only so far...).

With the Winter Olympics on television this week I am reminded that this painting process had its origins with the discovery that the Carnival of Venice theme of a pair of ice dancers was the key to one of my earliest watercolors. So it's been a little over four years that I've been painting again. Seems a lot shorter than that...

Oh - I've completed another painting (a watercolor) - but that's another post.