Loving Red

9x12 Oil

One of the toughest things for me to latch onto in my quest to paint well is to grasp the notion of "impression," through which what I see becomes more about what I feel. I don't want my paintings to look like photographs. That's a different art. I want them to be ... painterly, let's say, or impressionsitic.

To escape my tendency to noodle and detail, I made a huge attempt to get out of my comfortable box. This is the result of my day on the playground. Very different for me, but you know, I loved the freedom of not caring if that house looked like a house, or the trees looked like trees. I felt the color. I felt the sweet fluidity of the brush as it glided over the surface.

I felt strangely giddy with the outcome, weird or not. In a sense, this piece is a kind of personal breakthrough. I hope I can play in this sandbox again … sometime soon.