SOLD-Fine Pair-6x8

SOLD

a little ditty from an outing this morning. I knocked the dune down and moved the water about a quarter of the way around the compass! ya gotta do what you gotta do, right?

Don't let em see you sweat!

we've all seen or heard that right? well i'm going to go against that advice with todays post to give you a glimpse into the 'real' life of a working landscape painter. if you don't know already by reading this blog I make ALL my income from my art. that is no easy feat in this economy as i'm sure you can imagine. that said I am admitting that I've just come out of month long slump. oh my my it was miserable.

it all started a few months ago when I was painting some rather large paintings and thought everything was going well. life was good. the desire to paint was there, felt good with the level I was slinging the paint at, etc. etc. Then a black cloud blotted out the sun.

I emailed some images of the new work to a gallery who hadn't had anything new from me in quite a while. they said no, we don't like those paintings youre doing now..... send us -----(subject matter left out for obvious reasons) in a few months. then I talked to another gallery that said they weren't selling large paintings. but a few months ago when I was giving em small ones they said folks wanted larger paintings these days.

 

now I know this is going to sound ridiculous to those of you who don't do this for a living..... but I went into a tailspin. WHAT they don't want anything and its been X months, they don't want what i'm painting right now. they want x y and z. but i'm not painting that right now! don't want big....  I went big because they asked for bigger.

for weeks after this I was the perfect candidate for one of those anti-depressant commercials LOL. lost the desire to paint, didn't think about it every minute like I used to, started second guessing what to paint and how to paint it. this is the kiss of death to us creative types. we gotta paint from the heart and quit thinking about the 'business' end of the thing. easy to say and hard to put into practice when you live or die off the business end! thing is I know i'm not the only one having these bouts of doubt and fear.

I say its like walking a tightrope stories up in the air. the only way to walk the rope and get to the other side without falling is keep your eye on the rope right in front of you. the minute you look down or too far ahead on the rope, you start shaking and losing your balance.

I was cruising the web and was looking at some artists studios on their blogs, and then I went over to another painters blog who I really like and she had wrote "you gotta show up to work" and like a bolt of lightening from heaven I got that 'itch' to paint back. so I went out and .........

took a sander to some paintings that have been taunting me for the last couple of months. paintings that I kept fooling with during the slump that weren't working. OH MY! how cathartic! I gessoed over all my less than successful (read=crappy) paintings from the last year. what a tall pile that was!

 

 all of a sudden I wanted to start painting again. the "block" was gone magically!

 

so I went out this morning early (something I had quit doing) and painted Fine Pair 6x8. even blogged it!

 

I'm baaaaaack!