Today has been one of the best days and one of the worst days in the studio … lost in reverie of painting, angstie over how to express an idea, relieved to have finally surrendered to an impulse, and now … even more angstie over how well it all turned out.
All day I’ve been working on the Birth of Venus painting, specifically the background flowers. The original intention had been to render a wide variety of different flowers fairly realistically … suggesting a garden coming into bloom and crowded with randomly distributed vegetation. But I started sketching it out on the canvass this morning, and it just felt wrong … too much noise around the subject, my Venus … perhaps undermining the story I want her to tell. Angstie!
I ended up wiping off hours of work and starting over with a deeper and simpler idea … one I’ve been seeing in my imagination for days. Stylized roses emerging from the deep, blooming at the surface as idea expressed, and following Venus up into the golden day.
Wow … so that’s what I attempted to do … all day drawing and paint sketching roses. I just cleaned the pallet and decided to call it a night, determined to “turn it against the wall” as my teacher used to say when he meant, “you’re too close to it; time to give it a rest” … and I guess it is time to give it a rest when rose doodles over dinner turn into floppy dogs.
