Banal not; Unremarkable, yes.

I had a chance to submit my Banal Fail  piece for critique by an art professor.  I was surprised by the comments.

As I mentioned I was particularly fond of the way I was able to "stop" the bleeding of color in its track.  I allowed the bleeding to form streaks on this semi-sized Xuan and before the streaks could homogenize I used a hair blow-dryer to dry them.  To me it was like going back to the dark-room days when one pulls the print from the developer tray into the acetic acid stop bath.

 

I thought I was so resourceful.

I fretted over whether to paint birds into this landscape.  When I gave in and painted in the migrating geese I thought it was cliche.

It turned out that the professor did not like my treatment of the streaks at all.  "Contrived" was the comment.  I was feverishly defending myself.  I was trying to hint the presence of trees without making them too real. 

I  urged to express the presence without making it so mechanical.  The bleeding streaks intimated themselves as an afterthought, as evidenced by the layering, rather than as a natural occurrence.  The birds fit in fine and were not ostentatious in this particular case. That was the professor's adjudication.

I wanted to say one man's meat is another man's poison but then something else hit me.   I was too immersed in the technical trickery that I forgot about the overall ambiance of the painting..  What I deemed a monument became a boulder.

As a painting, it was unremarkable.  As an etude, why not.  I still like it.