Progress?

07 Sep Progress?

This is one I was working on maybe a  month or so ago.  I liked bits but it wasn’t coming together like I hoped.  On the actual beach on Thormanby Island there was so much detail in the water trails and seaweed and sand but overall there was a nice calmness and unity to it too.  In my painting I just felt a bit irritated by how I’d done it, and there wasn’t anyplace my eye wanted to rest.  I’m also at the stage in painting where I can half decently make the painting look like where or what I’m painting but they’re booooooooooooring.  Sometimes I sit drinking a cup of tea and looking at them and I nod off for a bit. Wake up with a lapful of tea and the urge to lop off an ear or two.  That’s not good!

I pulled it out again last week and tried to let go, that magical elusive technique so many of us seem to want to try but aren’t sure how.  How can the head get so in the way of the hand?  I tried to think that I wasn’t just trying to duplicate the scene but add something and tell my story about it.  

I liked letting go of the sharpness of the island.  I covered over and blocked off the beach on the right and then liked it that way.  May go back and add a few logs.  Some rocks disappeared in the process too, and the ones that stayed look a bit goofy. I do need to do some more work on the sand.  There’s still too much middle and my eye still is skimming around, not in a good way.  I think I’m going to add in some darker gray bits but in a different brush stroke, more of a soft line, wandering around the edges of the some of the water trails on the sand.  I’m wondering if that waterline against the island has to be straight, but wonder if that makes sense with nothing else being that way.    Not sure.  Never sure.  But I think I like how it’s going.  I think it looks more interesting and more unique and a bit easier to look at and sink into.  I wasn’t going to post it until I’d got back to finish it but it’s a busy week and I’m not getting there.  It sits on my easel in my kitchen torturing me a bit so I decided to put it up here too.  Spread around the torture, I say!  Put it two places I can stare at it wishing for a chance to get back to it!