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Beginning a painting can be a lot like beginning a new relationship:  heady, intense, full of promise.  Sometimes I love a painting right from the start, and send it joyfully into the world.  And then again sometimes a painting will seem to linger, leaning uncertainly against my studio wall.  I’m not in love with it, but I can’t quite scrub it entirely either.  Paintings like this need to sit around and percolate for a while before I gain the necessary distance to decide what they need—and then I can give them the brush off.  No, I don’t mean they get tossed in the recycling bin. 

Here’s the story of how I gained perspective on one recent painting.  By literally giving it the brush off, I discovered its true beauty.

The painting started out beautifully and simply with a fresh, clean underpainting.

I washed the underpainting down with alcohol, using brushstrokes in the direction of the water’s movement.

I loosely sketched the painting’s design with on top of the underpainting with white charcoal, and begin adding color to develop the waves’ form.  Up to this point, I’m loving the loose, suggestive potential here.  Meanwhile I keep looking at my reference photo:

I enjoyed adding layers to the painting, and eventually I had the following:

This painting, initially titled “Swept Away,” 22 x 39, sat in my studio for about a month.  While I loved the color palette and liked the sense of movement, something was bothering me.  It took a month of vague dissatisfaction, and a couple of trips and time away from the studio to feel enough distance from the piece to finally put my finger on the problem:  regularity.  The lines and angles are too straight, dividing the composition in two, and the rushing water across the bottom half, while realistic, comes in too regular a pattern for me. 

Finally I knew:  this painting needed the brush off.  I grabbed a 3” housepainter’s brush and carried the painting to my front yard.  There in the breeze, I brushed the bottom half of the painting away, whisking away the layers of dry pastel, so that only the underpainting remained. Already, I was breathing easier.  

Back in the studio, I combed through my reference photos taken on the same day, searching for inspiration, and found the following. 

The wave in the top photo was perfect: long and dramatic with beautiful volume and color, and great shadows.  But the foreground is a bit static.  The bottom picture has a flatter wave, but fantastic foreground movement. 

Here is the final version of my painting, combining the two ideas into one:

Turning Tides, 22 x 29 pastel

I reworked the top a tiny bit, to integrate it into its new foreground.  I’m much happier, and so is my painting: the caterpillar is now a butterfly—ready to leave its spot against the studio wall.

This painting, along with many others I am now planning and painting, will hang in my new show, “Heat Wave,” August 17-Sept 7, at Gallery 31 Fine Art on Cape Cod, in Orleans, MA.   For more info on this show, I'm thrilled to say it's being featured in this month’s American Art Collector magazine.  If you’d like to hear more, check out this short video clip from my studio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKPNcx73rpw