Its taken some time but I’m just about done with my recovery painting project. Better yet, I’ve started three other paintings. Doing that was much easier than working on the first one. (A photo of the nearly completed painting is included in this blog post.). I generally find good and bad in any painting I see, and that certainly includes my work, but I’ll be kind with this painting as it helped me through a bad time.
I was working on six paintings this summer when I had to have a tumor removed, so only one was finished. Everyone told me I was healing very fast, but it seemed like forever to me. I was in the hospital in early August, and when I started to paint again, in mid September, it was really tough. Surgery involved moving muscle from my back to my chest, and getting that muscle to adjust to the change in position was not easy. My right arm, which holds my palette, as well as my right shoulder were greatly weakened and had a hard time adjusting to the changes. After the first time I painting, it took me a week to bother to do it again. By the beginning of October, I was working on the painting, about an hour at a time, although, due to the lighting of the subject, I could only do so on cloudy days.
I will say that this was probably the most complicated painting I’ve ever done, so why i decided to do it at this time puzzles me. I did have an interest in painting some interiors of our house, but as you can see from the painting, this view involves a shot from the far end of our dining room, and across to our kitchen. The lighting attracted me to the setting, but it also made it extremely complicated. It meant that I was just going to have to work on it until I got it done, and that was going to take some time. I’ll continue to work on it until I feel it’s completed, but as of now, I prefer just to let it sit, and I’ll think about and possible changes after giving sometime so I can look at it with fresh eyes.
For now, I am attempting a Christmas painting of our neighborhood, as well as a study of our laundry area. I have also sketched out a self portrait from the bathroom mirror downstairs, but the other two excite me more than trying to paint my face.
Oh, and ignore that red word "Text" in the middle of the painting. That seemed to appear when I cropped and adjust the image. I'll have to find out how to remove it in future images.
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