I can't be blamed for overworking this spiderwort painting -- can I? After all, the sky was an apocalyptic twilight-ish orange all day because of all the fires blazing in northern CA. So I used my desk lamp to paint by...but, as most artists would tell you, not much good comes out of painting by lamp light.
My aim was to produce a stand-alone painting similar to the last spiderwort, which was in a sketchbook. My plan was to put down some color really fast and then finish off with contour lines with black ink, just as before. Somewhere in the process, my intuition dared me to finish the painting without ink. I wanted to avoid being too representational and stay loose, especially with the background.
Instead, here's the result: too many layers of paint over everything (I couldn't see nuances in color because of the poor natural light, so I just kept adding watery layers that ended up weighing the painting down )...and a sense of confusion for the viewer re: where the light is coming from.
(Kind of like the sense of confusion I feel right now about living in northern California.)
But I am not daunted. We learn by these mistakes. If we repeat them often, do we learn more deeply? I sure hope so.
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