The 40th Piece

It’s been a long time between the last thing I completed and now this.  Part of what has been holding me back is laziness, the other part is failure.  I’ve started and one way or another totally ruined the pieces I’ve been working on.  It happens, and it’s part of how I’m learning.  So on to the latest piece:  I got some new ideas about some work after going to first thursday last week.  On friday i bought some new canvases.  By friday night, i had my first thin layer of gray down:

The plan was to put as much into developing the background as I could before doing anything crazy.   I built this background up using sponge rollers, gray, white, and burnt umber.

The next day I dropped a very thin white onto the canvas and let it dry–these wet drops take about 12 hours to dry, sometimes 20 depending on the thickness.

So for the foreground, I got this idea from the New Yorker, of a Cowboy.  In terms of putting it together on the canvas, I was really not sure as to what I was going to do.  So, while I thought about it, I started working on the very foreground, the grass.   And the, I just started going at this cowboy image–I decided to go very thin, super thin burnt umber.  I had never painted like this and I didn’t know what I was doing (I was fortunate I didn’t craze, or saturate the paint under it, which I’m now discovering happens…).  So I just painted from one dark spot to light using water, and letting the paint bleed where it wanted:

I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, but I don’t really credit myself with knowing what I was doing.  Basically, I just rolled with what was going on.  Once I saw it was starting to look good, I tried to be very conservative about ruining the piece by doing too much.  I added a horizon line with this watered down paint I used on the cowboy.  I added a little texture to the top of the painting with molding paste to add a little to the painting–That was about it.

In scope of my goal to paint 40 pieces this year, I think this is a good piece to arrive at–namely, I utilized a lot of what I did this year, while kept up my experimenting and willingness to try something new.  I still have a couple pieces in the works, but they are presents, so I won’t post them until I’ve given them away.  Also, I’ll have to think of new goals for next year and probably update this blog… let me know if you have any questions, or whatever…

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~ by ruleaux on December 8, 2009.