New Painting, "Stand Calmly"

36" x 36" x 1.5"

Oil and Mixed Media on Canvas

"Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. there is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." -Leonard Cohen

This piece is 36" x 36, a little on the large side of normal for me. Sometimes working bigger is so intimidating for me, yet then when I finally suck it up and get to work on a large canvas I am usually pretty happy with the results.  I think it's the journey to the finished product that can be long, arduous and keep me up at night that scares me.  It's hard to believe the painting above started out as the painting below a few weeks ago....

but I just wasn't feeling it.  I would go out into the studio after leaving it alone for a while and hope to look at it with a different perspective, with a new appreciation, but every time I laid eyes upon it I was  overwhelmingly aware that it was not where it needed to be.  It was screaming at me to evolve.  Which was frustrating because at one point , the point it was at in the pic, I thought it was nearly done. As my mom (who is also an artist not to mention my biggest sounding board) says, "It's only paint, you can always paint over it if you want to change it"....that's what I did. 


And if I hadn't put all the blues and browns underneath the trees that manifested themselves yet again on my canvas, there would never be the subtle layers of color, the rich texture of unintended but beautiful shapes, the carved lines that give the finished piece depth, and substance, and "me-ness"...

Another reminder that it's all about the journey.  The twists, turns, doubts, discoveries, uncertainty .... that's how the light gets in.