Here’s my latest painting! I’m so glad it’s finished. Painting a striped bowl is possibly one of the most annoying things in the whole world! Won’t do that again. My stripes still aren’t right and I just don’t care! At some point it’s just time to move on.
The sad thing about getting super annoyed with this painting, is that it started out with such a fun idea. Years ago a woman gave me some of the best advice I’ve ever received and I wanted to make myself a little painting to remember it. She told a story about when she was little. Her mom made the family bread each week and one week her mom left the responsibility to her. She was proud and began making the bread the way she’d watched her mom do many times. But as she began to mix the dough seemed too dry, so she poured in some water. She mixed a bit more was was horrified to see that she’d mixed in too much water, so she added more flour. This process continued until her mound of bread dough was enormous! She was so embarrassed and didn’t want anyone to see what she’d done, so she snuck outside and buried it in the back yard! She then explained how later on she’d learned that the trick to knowing what bread dough needed was to stir up everything you had in the bowl all the way before making a decision. And then, as I’m sure you’ve all figured out, likened the experience to life and how sometimes when things don’t look the way you’d hope, rather than panic and run from the situation, you’ve got to sit and ‘stir what you’ve got’ and often you’ll find that everything was just the way it needed to be.
I think about that story all the time and wanted to make myself a ‘Stir What You’ve Got’ painting. So, of course, it happens to become the painting that drives me crazy to create. I don’t want to hang it on my wall anymore, I want to throw it in a corner and never think about it again!
On the bright side, there is one thing I’ll take away from this painting (besides never to paint a striped bowl again!). I loved adding extra colors to areas to make them read a richer hugh. For example, my white cloth has lots of blues and yellows and pinks, but it still reads as white cloth. (you can click on the photo to enlarge to see better what I mean) That’s actually the part that I had the hardest time working out- my colors easily got muddy and my cloth was reading more gray than white for most of my painting. I think I might have given my teacher an anxiety attack by the end, because he could see so easily all the mistakes I was making all the way through! But in the end I think I got a lot of knowledge about color and am exciting to try another colorful painting. I think adding unexpected colors to objects might become one of my things. Maybe. I love the idea of it. I’m hoping I’m past the worst part of the learning curve on that- I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how the next painting goes.