I’ve been bearing down hard on this painting, trying to finish it. Which can result in a certain amount of progress, but usually backfires after a while by making me feel completely burnt out. I sit and stare at the painting, sit and stare, and cannot think of what to do to it. It’s utterly [...]
Posts Tagged ‘finishing’
Little-ease
Posted in Work in Progress, tagged "Lead Balloon", dictionary, doubt, finishing on April 27, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Really, Truly, Almost Finally Finished
Posted in Work in Progress, tagged "Mote", finishing on April 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
One more pass over the body, and some finicky tinkering in the head-space.
Sweet lord, how happy it will make me to actually finish something. Even though—or especially because— it took almost a whole year. And is only 16″ x 12″.
thisclose (?)
Posted in Work in Progress, tagged "Mote", finishing on February 26, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
I’m hoping once I’m all moved into my new studio, and have the lights installed, that I can spend an evening or two just polishing this off. It would be so nice to have something finished.
Stalled
Posted in Work in Progress, tagged "untitled/girl tree", finishing, plants on January 31, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
This painting is stuck right now. I want to finish it, and move my thoughts on to other paintings, very badly. But I just can’t figure out what to do to make that happen. It is a kind of failure of vision: I look and look but the forms stubbornly refuse to coalesce into resolution. [...]
Asymptotes
Posted in Thinking Things Through, Work in Progress, tagged "Indirection", anne truitt, finishing on January 27, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Some years ago I worked out a nice little metaphor for the path a painting follows toward completion: an asymptote, a curving line that forever approaches tangent with the x or y axis but never gets there. The concept of the asymptote is perhaps the only fragment that remains from my career in high school [...]
Apropos of Finishing
Posted in Thinking Things Through, tagged anne truitt, finishing on January 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
I mentioned in an earlier post that I am reading the journals of the sculptor Anne Truitt. This morning I re-read a passage from Daybook which touches so directly on the difficulties of finishing a piece of work that I had to post it, given that my last post dealt with my own struggle in [...]
Inactivity
Posted in Work in Progress, tagged "Indirection", finishing on January 17, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
I hadn’t worked on this painting at all in several months when my friend Jesse, who runs the Loggernaut reading series here in Portland, asked me if he could use one of my paintings for the website. I sent him over a few images and he settled on ‘Indirection’ as being the most congruent with [...]
Another Day’s Work
Posted in Work in Progress, tagged "untitled/girl tree", finishing on November 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
By all rights, this painting should be feeling close to finished by now. And yet, it isn’t. The problem is that I can’t seem to put my finger on the problem. I only know it just doesn’t look right to me yet. The foliage is not resolved, somehow. Too piecey, perhaps? I feel a dangerous [...]
Another Tree-Person
Posted in Work in Progress, tagged "untitled/girl tree", finishing, titles on October 27, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
As promised, here is the second “tree-person” painting that I’m working on. Dave, incidentally, thinks it’s hilarious that I call them “tree-people” as a place-holder name until I come up with their real title. It makes him think of those Californian hippie/activists who live in trees to prevent loggers from cutting them down. Not really my [...]
