I'm not sure I can sell this; at least, not yet. This last weekend I took a wonderful workshop from Carol Marine. I loved it. It was my first painting workshop ever, and I reveled. I had stumbled on Carol's work early, and admired her sure hand, but it's one thing to admire someone's work, and another to watch them paint something and see how they manipulate the colors and brush, and how they build the piece. (It was also good to see that even the teacher sometimes struggles. As she Carol, "Every painting is like a chess game. You don't know how it's going to come out.")
So I feel like it tightened up my approach. I've been thrashing recently about what I want to paint, and in what style, and had fallen into the futzing school of paint: If I poke at it long enough, it will come out OK. Carol emphasized looking at your setup carefully, blending the right colors, and putting down sure strokes that move the composition forward. (Well, she covered a few other things, too.)
This piece was the last one I did on the final day of the workshop. Most of the people were packing up to go home, and I worked while clean-up swirled around me. Carol would come over, say something kind, then tell me to darken it. She had to do that about three times. So I finally went boldly dark, and it popped. There's a lesson there. Courage.
I'll be posting more pictures in the next few days.
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