How to ruin an unfinished painting

This is the tale of how an unfinished painting with possibilities turned in to a waste of paint, kitsch and silly. Instead of throwing in the trash I put it on display. Silly me.  It's an oil painting of mine (currently named pajama party) that started out as a village in the mountains with a clock tower:

I just felt it need something. So when there was a call for paintings after Chagal I added some floating people. See below, for the three floaters.

Then I thought the clock tower had to go, then a friend insisted  I needed to take out the bottom figure - and I thought she was right... so I did but then
I had a dilemma - it really needed something else but I had no idea what.   And it sat like this for a long time.  Then the wonderful eccentrics and the local coffee shop put out a call for unicorn paintings for a summer show. One night after I had gone to bed - I sat bolt upright, went to the painting and put in the unicorn in white. Added the colors and the pajamas the next day.  I don't know. It's tacky. But somehow it works.  At least that is what I think now.....  When it comes home from the unicorn show - who knows what might happen to it... perhaps the circular file.....
AND:
Here it is on the wall at the unicorn show:

Painting: Spacious No. 3: The Dry Lands

These mountains, rising in the distance under an expanse of sky, began their existence looking like scenery on the planet MARS. The underpainting I used for this oil-on-canvas-board scene was cadmium red.  You can see it clearly in the stage on the right. The main shapes of the mountains and the road line were immediately laid in with a soft cloth. I learned this technique when I went to a SCANart.org demonstration where a painter used it to build  a flower painting.  The red was hard to give up though, so this painting ended up as a Southwestern sort of scene.  I thought the colors were off, but a friend who'd lived out west told me this is how the mountains look at a certain time of year.  I'm not positive that I'm through with it.  I have terrible urges to add items to the foreground such as a rusty pickup, a gates, an oil derek, a wagon wheel, an OKeefe-eske skull, or an antique gas pump, or aburro, etc. etc - all the usual Western sterio-typical items. I am trying to resist this urge.

One thing I like about this painting is a funny effect the sky has in different light. Sometimes the clouds almost seem to have a depth, I think from the layering of blue and white that I used. Sometimes it looks like it must be raining over the mountains. Sometimes it looks like dusk, and there is a city on the other side of the mountains - giving off a glow.  It's quite odd. And I am not sure if I could reproduce it.

It occurs to me that I have not posted Spacious No 2, nor Spacious No 1 - so I guess I am ahead of myself somehow.

PAINTING: The Glaring Irregularity again

Update Mar. 9, 2011  This painting drives me to drink well, coffee.

VOLCANO PIC CHANGES AGAIN!! And Again! And Again. And Again.

Updated Jan 20, 2011 -->  "The Glaring Irregularity!" This painting has gone from just odd, with a Greek classically clad family standing at an angle, to bizarrely dragonesque, to google earth meets black velvet, to Google earth meets VanGoh to lava spill in candyland. At this point it is all about undulation, oscillation, periodicity somehow. Everything comes in waves in this pic now.  Although I like this version in someways, I miss the very first version with all the crazy eccentric lava.  Sigh. Let's give it a few days and see....

I am beginning to understand something. I need to preserve the eccentricities somehow, but in a way that serves the overall composition. I am most likely to use this cronic revisionism when I don't have an overall composition in mind at the start of the painting. Scroll down for pervious versions.

PREVIOUS UPDATE  -- I have altered this so many freaking times and still I am not statisfied with this painting. I would like to be able to throw it out. But I just can't. I need to nail it down in some way that pleases me for more than five minutes. But in the night version here, the smoke bothers me. I want something to unify the composition. ( I think because of the previous tentacles picture it became parallel lines.. hmmm.)

After  seeing pictures and videos of Mr Etna erupting in Italy -  I just had to revise  this picture!!!  MORE RED!!!  that's what  Eli Cleary told me.  Okay I am not yet done with it..... and of course I am nuts.  I just can't seem to stop. I actually showed the second to last version of this. But it still bothered me. Someone said the lava looked like a dragon. And I could see it didn't follow the land contures but seemed vertical somehow.  SO here is yet another incarnation of the same canvas. I might change the title too.

PREVIOUS UPDATE:  Below is the version that I showed at Artwell in 2010: Between The Darkness and The Deep. What promoted me to change that one is I couldn't get the lava to lie down on the landscape.. hmmm. I don't know what's come over me, painting a semi-readable landscape. My usual fair is oddities like the very first version at the bottom .

I like  the early eccentric version a lot. It is a  completely different painting that I wish I still had!   Apparantly I am painting the eccentricity right out them I think and I don't know why! I seem to be going though a pseudo reality phase....  It might have to do with my new reading glasses.  I had  quite a stigmatism in the left eye which some new glasses correct. When I first used them, every thing on the right seemed bigger than it should. In the original version, what prompted me to begin changing things was I could figure out what the people were standing on. Then I couldn't figure out where the horizon was since the Island was tilted. Probably due my stigmatism.  I guess my brain had learned to compensate..... To the left is the lava that looked like a dragon. To the right is my favorite version:

Painting: Busy No. 2 - Tentacles

In darkness - who knows what is waving its tentacles frantically about? This is a sort of an obsessive vision. Once I started I couldn't let it go.  The style began with a previous work Cat Dreams, which is more readable, and notches that style it to a frantic, uncomfortable rush. It's oil on canvas board. Like the previous bit "In the Museum" I am not expecting a lot of folks will like it. But some how I needed to make it anyway. Below are earlier stages of the work where I envisioned the lines as highways, even added cars. Some may prefer these but I favor the end result at the right.

 

Painting: one last tweak on Blue Velvet - the cat

What did I change in this painting?  Yes!  The cat didn't fit. No cat I have ever known would sit with its back to two persons as they approached it outside. Most cats would skitishly prepare to run somehow, then look back to see if they were still approaching, stopping if the people involved made a friendly noise. With everything else so delicately poised, it seemed wrong to me to have the cat so solid and seated. So I fixed it. The lines work better now as well with the cat's tail leading to the arm, leading to the faces...  Note the cat above and the cat in the version below.

The original drawing was called Bad Date as I mentioned in an earlier post. As you can see, it was energetic and threatening. Needless to say, the feeling of this painting is a gentle one, and does not follow the sketch. See my earlier post for commentary on that change.

Painting: Rural Free Delivery

This is an oil painting on a small canvas board.   This painting hung around for a year because I couldn't figure out how to finish it.

Below are earlier versions of it.  I have this debate with every picture:  when do I stop? Things are lost and others gained. Perhaps I am over painting them.

PAINTING: River of Sky

This is finally finished, I think anyway. It is one of those pictures where I didn't have a good composition to start with, and I fiddled and fiddled to bring the perspective into line. Originally there was a water fall in the rear as well and judging by the height of the trees in the foreground, and on how far back it was -  it must have been hundreds of feet high higher than Victoria Falls even.  It didn't make visual sense though it was very dramatic. It makes more sense to me now.

It's quite small 8 by 10 canvas board with oils. There is a cat in this picture too. Whenever i can fit one, there is a cat.

Below you can see the original design - which I liked in someways, and the stages through which it evolved. The original, I liked it but I could not accept it visually. Water doesn't fall at an angle. By perspective, and by comparison with the trees on the banks of the falls, - that water fall was ENORMOUS - taller than Victoria Falls.  Slowly I tweaked it into a form I could accept. I do like the some of the early versions for their  energy and angles etc. I like the finished painting better.

Red girl or maybe pink girl...

This entry was moved from the Metaphoratorium Gallery.



With the potential for endless digital manipulation it is really difficult to know when you are done with a picture like this. Andy Warhol might have loved the idea - a production line of variation. I have quite a few varriations on this. The original was much more crudely drawn. Also it was a larger screen with reams of wild hair. I had just discovered the blender,smearing tools in NeoPaint and was having fun.

Now here is a project for a geeky artist out there somewhere - write a program that randomly creates altered versions of one photo in a slide show installation in a museum.......