Since my operation in early August, I've been in recovery mode. The operation was on my chest on the right side. That had made painting rather difficult once I was on my feet again. Everything I did required me to do it with my left arm only. Since I'm left handed, it wasn't too much of a problem.
I really couldn't paint outside at that time, so I planned a few interior paintings - ideas involving objects in various rooms of our house. I would carry my painting equipment up from the basement, one piece at a time. In the beginning, this was actually quite exhausting. I found I could paint for only a little while, but then I had to carry it all down again - one at a time.
It took me a few weeks to get back into the swing of things. By the end of September, I wasn't getting as tired. Enough of my first painting was being finished that I felt a bit motivated. Still, the painting proved to a difficult one.
The subject is a view of our kitchen from the dining room, and it involves a lot of depth in which the cabinets and counter appear at different angles. I've been painting it slowly in order to capture both the interior and exterior light. To get the right contrast, I had to use the interior light of both the bathroom, and the hallway just to illuminate my canvas enough to get a reasonable representation of the kitchen. I even added a work light that I used at times.
One of the conflicts within the painting was a large bouquet of flowers. Once I finished the kitchen and started to work on the flowers sitting in the dining room, I realised that the bouquet was too large and dominated the painting's view. Once the flowers faded and were thrown away, my wife replaced them with the orchid our daughter had bought her some time ago. My wife had been struggling with getting the orchid to flower for quite some time. In the last two weeks, it has finally done so. This slender plant with its small collection of flowers fits perfectly where the large bouquet of flowers once stood within the painting. It will still be some time before I finish the work. I can only paint it during cloudy weather, as sunshine disturbs the lighting. Hopefully, I'll have finished my first post op painting by Thanksgiving. We'll see.
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