All The Cool Kids Stay Out After Dark

This piece was inspired by a few things...the beach sketches from last weekend, the Egon Schiele painting from a few posts ago, and the fact that after looking at the inspiration v. what I came up with, I was very disappointed. It's funny, I swear I liked that old house with the flowers when I did it, but now...it just seems completely out of sorts with itself.

Now you could say the same thing with the top, newer piece. It's got tons of different colors, swatches of blue, next to red, light green with purple, and a brown triangle rising from nothing with a sky full of dashes and scratches. But instead of feeling like a giant pile of trash i see depth, moodiness, perspective and an overall consistency with the application of the marks across the painting. In the single house piece, the darks are applied with such a different touch than the flowers that they just don't make sense together. They are so distinctly different, plus the fact that they are in no way integrated with each other, that it almost seems like one of the parts must not be finished...like I stopped before covering the rest of the canvas...not good.  

Then, last night i decided to work on the house . While it doesn't have the same depth as the first piece, I think it has two ways of viewing...First you can look at it like a city from above, almost like a google maps image. Second, and the way I am starting to see it, is that its a front view of a city with large skyscrapers, and the boxes are all little windows. I like the shallow space mixed with the crammed in windows, giving the feeling of the stifling packed big city. It's strange that the lack of depth when it was a house bugged me, but now it seems to be helping the composition and energy. It's not quite done as I need to decide what to do with the sky, but I already think it's a better piece than the original every would have been.

Such is the life of me as an artist....you like what you did for approximately ten seconds, paint over it a few times, get distracted by a dying mouse outside for a while (see mouse post) and eventually you come out with something that's pretty cool. It's almost like I know what Im doing.