day #365 - the end of an era

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I thought I was on top of it; I had finished early and was looking for a movie to watch already 3 hours ago. And I don't know how time went by. A phonecall, some networking studying, some online shopping and here we are, already past the time for an early movie. Regardless, today is a special day. The blog is over! I finished 365 days of daily painting and recording it, whatever that means. A big part of the process I will have to keep doing mainly for myself. Perhaps taking daily photos of my work and saving it on some folder. This has provem useful many times when I trying to date a piece I've been working on. Also making a small diary of today's achievements. It's still useful. But this will be done for my eyes only. I also don't know if I will be continuing my obsessively daily painting. How would life be if I had days off? Now for example that I'm moving out and I have to daily chores that until now were completely taken care of, perhaps I'll allow my
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day #39 - Daydreaming

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I'm happy about today's painting. In itself, it's a successful one; the composition is nice, the depth is there, foliage has been improved, the lightplay is there; It wasn't like that when I was about to decide putting my brush down. At that moment the background was light, empty; not accurate enough and color palette was not as intense, neither full of blue and warm tones as "reality". But for a change, I decided that despite my commitment to reproducing certain aspects of reality perhaps a nice painting was even better. So I just let it go. I put my paintbrush (brushpen) and called it a day.

I prefer to paint from imagination - I always did; yet when I choose to paint what I see, I've always felt the obligation to reproduce what I see, even when the end result would suffer. Suffer by perhaps an unbalanced composition, uninteresting topic, or by merely my lack of technique. It took me all these years to allow myself to remove items from the composition that were retracting. Why draw that branch if it's not adding to my painting?

Today I feel like I went to the next step. Instead of overworking my background and my palette until I can say I've brought into my painting all the tones/hues that I see and destroy it by too much effort, I can say "maybe these are not the real colors because I wasn't able to nail them on the first few layerings, but the work looks nice in itself and I don't owe anybody to replicate what I saw".

So what do I like about this piece? That it's serene, that it's complete. I like how the forground flowers contrast against the mid-plain, I like the shape of the flowers. I like the lightplay on the trunk/branches. I like the green, blues and yellows. I like the cubic blocks of marble in the background. I've realised today how much I love the interplay of geometric and natural forms. I like the composition and the watercolor-y feeling of the work. Having said that, the rocks at the left on the foreground could had been a little less dark. Though it's balancing with the big mass of trees on the right, it still is a bit more attention grabbing that I had hoped for. Well, next time!

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