As I have done before, I am returning to the practice of Daily Painting to get myself in front of a canvas again every single day. Its not that I don’t want to create, its just that it can be difficult to paint on command when I am out of practice. Sometimes it feels overwhelming, sometimes too rigid, sometimes uninspiring or in conflict with my mood. Daily painting eliminates all that by giving me the freedom to paint anything I want, in any medium and style. Every day I create a new piece with the intention of finishing it on that day, all in one sitting if possible. Canvas sizes tend to be small, and not everything is a keeper, but it allows for a lot of flexibility and experimentation and fun.
The first week of my return to painting after taking an extended break because of child care and covid-related issues, I painted outside every day. It was therapeutic for me to be “out of the house”, even if I was on the back deck with a dog at my feet. I painted trees, imagined and real. Plein air painting (painting outside, in front of your subject, with the changing light and weather) is really hard for me - it is difficult to translate a 3D object into 2D on a canvas and have it still have depth. And it is hard to not make stuff up - to not change the color to suit my mood, or to ignore value as I tend to do, or to add a happy little tree over here and a friendly little branch over there… Not that that would be against the rules for plein air painting - the artist has creative license to change things up however they want. But I aim to improve painting from real life, and as the weather cools down this fall I plan to get out to some parks and nature spaces to practice this more.
The second week, battling a virus (that thankfully wasn’t covid), I moved indoors to my dining room table and played with abstract painting in acrylics on paper - a far cry from the representational paintings in oil on canvas that I typically do. This is another area that I am wanting to improve my skills - I am way too logical to easily create abstracts. I understand the elements of art (line, shape, form, space, texture, color, and value) and how they relate to make an interesting painting, but creating a painting of something that is not actually anything is wayyyy hard. But that makes it wayyy fun, too! It feels good to do something different and hard, and I feel that improving my ability in abstract painting will benefit my representational painting as well. Time well spent.
The third week I finally moved up into my studio. I had an itch to paint still life of flowers - kind of like painting plein air but with a controlled light source and composition. I set up my space with a black background, a bright lamp, a bunch of flowers (fresh and silk), and have been painting still life flower arrangements ever since.
