I finished another painting and edited an earlier one. I’ve been wondering to myself why I post these things on the blog, when I am usually not all that crazy about the way that they turned out. I suppose these parts of the blog are more about me musing the artistic process than a demonstration of my artistic prowess. Anyway, having started, I feel somehow compelled to continue. In both of these paintings, I reached the point where I was sick of them and just wanted to finish them so that I could do something else. I imagine that “real artists” must have the same feelings. I suppose I could have put them aside (and, in fact, I did put the abstract one aside for a few weeks), but the portrait one was pretty close to being finished, so I felt compelled to reach the end.

Here is the new one, “Pub Girl”. It is based on a photo I took of a girl at a pub in Shoreditch. She really did have purple dye in her hair. She was sitting outside with others on a cool day. I liked the grouping of different glasses and bottles on the table, which is actually what drew me to the photo in the first place. Maybe I should have just done a painting of that? I was experimenting with trying to create a face in a sort of Picasso impressionist way, since my attempts at realism in faces has been less that successful. It kind of works. If you recall my blog of a few days ago where I mentioned that I thought I was painting between the lines too much and was not free enough, this the painting I was thinking of. Parts of it are OK, but overall it is missing any spark. I also couldn’t quite figure out the background, since the background on the original photo didn’t really work. And then I got sick of it and didn’t feel like spending too much time on a detailed background for painting I just wanted to finish. I’m glad that I did, because there are some things about the finished product that I like.

I went back this week and fiddled around with that abstract painting of intersecting bullseyes I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. I added those balls (they are pingpong balls cut in half, glued on and painted) and converted the colors to more primary colors, rather than the original darker hues. And I decided that it worked better as a diamond than as a square. It’s better (it is actually no worse than some of the crap I saw at the Frieze, especially if I bothered to clean up the lines, although it would have to be ten times bigger) and at least I think I am finally done with it. I hung it in the powder room of the flat. (For reasons I cannot comprehend, the Brits call powder rooms “cloak rooms”. When I first heard that I assumed that it was a coat closet, but, of course, they don’t have closets here for anything, much less coats. I looked it up online and the definitions I found were about storing cloaks and hats and the alternate definition is public or downstairs toilet. I did discover that it sometimes refers to the Men’s Room, as opposed to the “ladies powder”. But I couldn’t find the exact etymology. My guess is that, like powder room in the US, it was derived because people were embarrassed to say “toilet”or anything that referred to the actual bodily functions going on in there.) (It occurs to me that this aside is probably the only interesting thing that I have written in this post.)