Dear Diary,
Remember back in January of 2016 when I painted 30 canvases in 30 days and killed six or seven innocent paint brushes and consumed the body weight of a surly, obese lap dog in frozen pizza and then auctioned the paintings for charity, after which, I cried into a stack of pizza boxes for like a day because I was so tired and happy and tired? Yeah, I have spotty memories of that month myself, but I do distinctly remember painting this flying trout canvas, which I called “Truitonne,” because I never dreamed I would have so much fun painting a fish:
Bonsoir! Je m’apparel Truitonne. In the auction for the charities, “Truitonne” proved surprisingly popular, and after the auction ended, someone contacted me about making a much larger version.
Since I had (quite literally) four times the amount of space, I decided to get fancy and include the diamond pattern found in the skin of river trouts.
By this point, I was liking the diamonds but really needing them to be blendier. Subtler. Less obviouser. You see what I’m saying.
In pursuit of subtlety, I spent hours adding layers upon layers of glaze, in the process of which, I convinced myself that the trout definitely wasn’t getting too dark vis a vis the original. Nope, not too dark. Just fine with the darkness. Stop obsessing about the dark and go to bed.
I got up in the morning, looked at the canvas, and screamed. It was absolutely too dark. In the process of lightening it, of course, I almost lost the diamonds. And so it goes.
After many more hours, I found the lightness-to-diamonds balance every girl dreams about, at which point, I moved on to the carriage.
This was shot at about 4:30 in the morning, when my interior dialogue sounded like this. “I CANNOT PAINT ONE MORE CIRCLE.” “Oh, stop being melodramatic. Yes, you can.” “I WILL THROW MYSELF INTO A FIERY PIT FILLED WITH FLAMMABLE PAJAMAS IF I HAVE TO PAINT ONE MORE CIRCLE.” “You are not making this easier. Be quiet.”
At 6:00 this morning, this is how far I’d gotten. There’s a lot left to do, those pits of pajamas don’t set themselves on fire. A girl’s gotta multi-task.
1 Comment
Cindy Dauer · May 7, 2016 at 9:15 am
Wow! This is looking amazingly great! I am totally feeling you on the frustration and worry. But you're solving all your problems and totally killing it.! And those tiny circles, holy cow! Fantastic progress is going on. Hilarious write-up, per usual. Wooo, go go. 😀
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