watercolor 40 11 x 12.5 “
4:06 PM: i tuckered myself out moving all those watercolors around and then starting a new one so late in the day. once i got it back to the house, we both agreed that watercolor 40 is complete.
it’s a blessing that i painted it at the end of the day, at a point where i didn’t have time to get into the weeds and start overworking it.
so what you see here on the right is it. one thing that’s different is something i learned from matisse: in a painting of his i was studying as i drank my coffee, i noticed he had used different images in 2 quadrants of his painting, which he divided off in two box like areas, upper right & lower left. yet he had manged to make the entire composition read as one unified painting. it dawned on me that, to facilitate my process of departing from a literal interpretation of one of my trail photos, what if i used two or three or more creek photos, picked elements that i find exciting and insert them around the picture plane, making the overall composition my priority rather than trying to stay somewhat true to the photo. so just with the 10 or so photos from recent trail walks, there are a multitude of compositional and coloristic possibilities. it’s really like a new world opening up, and it was right in front of me the whole time!
watercolors on my east wall as it now looks
2:40 PM: today was unusual. i removed all the watercolors on my east studio wall, took them off the foam core backing and tacked them directly to the wall. at first, they were too crowded, so i took some and placed them on the previously empty south wall, which is a bit harder to get to, as it’s blocked by a hard to move table. the next step will be to paint that east wall with a fresh coat of white, which will hide all the paint stains & make it far easier to look at the watercolors.
the immediate result is that each of them is far easier to see and appreciate, and it’s easier for me to evaluate what i’ve done thus far. there’s been a steady progression, with some bumps in the road and some that just don’t make it. that’s to be expected. what excites me is that i feel i’ve reached a point where it’s possible to build on the important discoveries while defining where it is i tend to take a wrong turn.
as a direct result, watercolor 40, which i started rather late in the day, has a distinctly different feel.