Cat 71, Lizzy
12" x 12", acrylic on canvas
(I found this post set up as a draft in six years ago and had never posted it.
At that point Lizzy had been going downhill with age related health problems, and she finally lost the battle in May of 2023. She was my companion for 17 years and is still missed.)
April of 2020: working from a photo taken in 2012. I was attracted to the twist in the body and the strong lighting from a window.
Staying with less intense colors and focusing on softer edges and simplified forms.
There was a lot of straight white going on in the photo- which ended up flattening the image into nearly geometric planes. Adding a light tint of color to the white helped regain some volume. The curtain in the background had to be subdued as well- it nearly took over the painting at first.
I stopped posting partially due to the distraction of life events at the time and to break the cycle of thinking I had to produce and post something, regardless of the quality. It had become less fun and more of a self-imposed task.
Since then, I have gone through a long "dry" spell.
I progressed in skill compared with the earliest posts but in repeating myself endlessly had reached the point where I was losing interest and no longer moving forward.
I went through the collection of old paintings and sorted them into three categories:
Keep, Rework, or Gesso over to reuse. I spend more time now looking and thinking.
Looking through these older works with fresh eyes from the distance of time has been satisfying.
I can now see what is problematic and what might be changed. For most the problem was the compositional structure, and no amount of color or value adjustment or fancy brushwork was going to salvage the attempt.
