Ahhh, it feels so good to finally finish this painting and be somewhat happy with it. I’ve been struggling with this canvas for almost 3 years. Thats WAY too long. I started working on this right after I got back from Hawaii. I was inspired by this color palette, and I’m pleased to see that the final painting still has most of those colors.
The painting has gone through so many iterations I can’t even remember them all. Squares are a hard to shape to work on and elements of the painting always seemed unbalanced. The first idea was to collage a carousel scene onto the background I haphazardly painted. I was pretty excited about the layered tissue paper carousel horse I made but it didn’t work with the background. I kept it for posterity.
The second or third attempt to resolve the painting was so pitiful that it didn’t even warrant any photography. With thoughts of Hawaii and beaches on my mind I tried to paint a mermaid into the scene. It ended horribly. Here is the preliminary sketch. It in fact wasn’t too bad, but trust me what made it onto the canvas was terrible.
With this 30 Day Painting challenge I took it upon myself to finish the painting – No Matter What! I also had no more fresh canvases and it irked me that I had this really nice 10×10 canvas lying around with a mess of paint on it. In a bold move I painted over much of the existing image with white paint, creating a lot of texture to mask what was already there. Sometime when I pretend I have become a household name like Picasso or Van Gogh I imagine what art historians will think of my art, with layers of botched paintings underneath. Its a fun thought experiment. Using remnants from earlier pieces I created this year, I finally finished the piece. Huzzah!
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