look west twice

Another recent painting. This one has kind of a story. The pic on the left is in the mid stage from my iphone and the one on the right is the finish with my fancy doorstop of a camera. My gallery in Richmond called me, Brazier fine art, and said we have someone who likes your work, do you have something in a 30x40 with trees? and I said what I would always say as an illustrator when I was asked, can you paint a car made up of a bunch of different types of cars? Why Yes!!! Sure. I busted out a 30x40 and looked for images to paint from, went through my studies and found nothing, but did find a nice piece of reference from Wyoming. So I launched into it not really thinking about it. I sent a pic to the gallery and they said "Too western" so I thought, Crapadoodle. Gotta fix that. One thing I have learned is that if a terrain represented in a painting isn't within 50 miles of the gallery, its chances of selling are reduced (depending on the gallery). As I looked at it I realized that I didn't really like the sage anyway, it was too lumpy. Looked like a herd of grazing sheep. I repainted the ground along with everything else and was really pleased with a few things, namely the big green bush on the mid-left it's about 4 or 5 strokes and I left it. Wish I could have done that on everything else. Baby steps. I also recarved the tree a bit to give it better shape, repainted almost everything including all the clouds, twice. I banged it out in a hurry and shipped it wet, not in a frame either. Let me tell you it's a trick to ship a sopping wet canvas. I used a trick I learned from Glazer Framers when they ship their frames they screw them to big pieces of card board and put large washers in to keep the screws from popping out. Then I used chunks of foam and cardboard around the painting to keep it from hitting the box on the butter side. It might be of interest to let your eyes dart back and forth from one spot to the same spot on the other to see what changes were made.

One of these days I'm going to borrow a video camera and do one of those stop motion films on the evolution of a painting. I love those. This one, for example, is friggin genius.