During one of those off days, my friend snapped a picture of the highway. Just a random picture. Something to do with the index finger on the iphone.
That picture was about ready to be deleted. It was not intereting. But what do you do with your day when you try to stay off the road as much as possible? Play with all your pictures, my friend said. Cropping is easy to do.
"I want to paint that." That was my impulse after I saw the cropped photo.
My first attempt at the photo was too "faithful". I think I was too busy recounting all the details, down to the little bush in the foreground. The bush looked out of place in the painting. For one it was too small to really establish a perspective. Besides, it really took away the abstract patch type ambiance. I also thought the horizon lines very too strong. They were too rigid and confining. This painting attempt had all the undesirable misgivings of painting from a picture.
On my second attempt I thought I would just recall from the photo. I think I was playing a little more with the elliptical shapes of the landscape, rather than the landscape itself. The lines definitely livened up and were not as forbidding. Gone was the redundant bush in the foreground.
I wanted to play with the shape partitions more, i.e. the sky, the bend in the highway on the left, and the filed in the foreground. In my mind, this had turned into an exercise of painting patterns and lines. I was reluctant to do this a third time. I seemed to me that I had spent my soul in the first attempt already, and anything subsequent to that is boring and repetitious. Perhaps I just want to prove to myself that I have discipline and I can work at something until I am satisfied.
I looked at my third attempt and I saw haste and desertion. What have I done! I was a mad man. I really couldn't make anything out of it. The painting looked disjointed. I should have stopped at two. Perhaps I was tired of toying with the same time over and over again.
Could I just be sick of it?
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