Beacon Hill Art Walk 2011

In some respects it’s a good thing to never be satisfied, always striving to be better, thinking your work is never good enough, as long as you never give up. I use to paint much more quickly. I worked at slowing myself down. Now, even though I start to lose patience with myself, it has improved my paintings so I keep getting slower, seeing more and more that I want to do with a painting. I suppose it has more to do with not knowing what I didn’t know when I’d whip out a painting in no time.

It reminds me of my mother and I with our reading. My mother could get through several hundred pages in no time. I, on the other hand would plod along forever. The difference was that I could remember what I’d read for years and years, while my mother would forget what she’d read until she picked up the same book again and got halfway through it a second time. I always wished I could read as quickly as she, and she always wished she could retain what she read as I did.

The idea of painting slowly or quickly is a bit different. Being of the impressionist flavor, I still paint more quickly than someone of the more classical approach with underpainting but I believe I’m getting to a happy medium (no pun intended). The level of detail I include has grown yet, by using palette knives, it keeps the impressionist flavor. I no longer shy away from difficult subjects but they don’t always make it to the front lines either. It is more about pushing forward and growing as an artist and in turn as a person. Not giving up, never giving up, that’s the key.