October 19, 2019
490mm x 390mm
Acrylic on Canvas

I don’t know if this happens to all artists, but I know it happens to a lot of them that I know and every once in a while it happens to me. What this event can be defined as is a bit difficult. The best I can do is describe what happens.

Typically, you’re painting along making art, and feeling pretty good about making incremental gains that seem to get you closer to the ideal you have in your head. Maybe more often than not, the paintings you make feel pretty good to you. Then you make one painting where you decide to do one small thing different (or you didn’t decide and it just happens.) Only it’s not so different, it’s a lot different. And it breaks everything.

The acrylic painting above is the most recent moment that this has happened to me.

To me, this landscape painting is not inherently terrible but it’s not explicitly great either. The takeaway is it what means to me is the way I have painted is missing something fundamental and work must be done with my methods to fix things. That might mean taking everything apart and rebuilding how I do things.

Sometimes when these things happen. It hits you kind of hard and you need to take a break from painting to re-asses. That’s not the only reason I have such a break in the timeline on this site but it was the thing that I noodled on in the time elapsed.

Something that I can feel good about is typically when a wrench like this shows up, it usually leads to a big step forward…after making a lot of questionable works.