Playing "Why don't I like this painting?"

Chili Drawer

I was ready to try a larger (16x20) abstract, something very simple, but a deeper exploration of the color range of oranges. I divided the canvas panel into a grid and started painting every shade of orange I could come up with, plus deep violet, which is really a darkened red violet.

When I finished the first pass, I wasn't happy. I decided the rectangles were too small and too many.

I took black charcoal and and drew a new grid, with fewer lines, giving me fewer rectangles with a wider range of sizes. I let it sit like that till the next day, all the time feeling like those charcoal lines over the colors were the most beautiful thing I'd ever painted.

But I also realized that in normal evening roomlight, I could barely make out what was in the painting. I had used so little white, wanting more intense colors, that only the yellow bits and the pale orange were visible; everything else looked like shades of dark brown. It was a values nightmare.

The next morning I looked at it and went "Ew!" I hated the lines—it seemed to be all about the lines—there were too many, too dark. In fact, I was so disappointed with the work that I had a little crisis of confidence—Why had I been so happy the day before with what was obviously awful?

So I took the colors I already had mixed and added varying amounts of white into them and repainted all the rectangles lighter—some a little, some a lot. I deliberately made all the lines except some of the ones around the edges either fade a lot or disappear. I also took advantage of the first grid to make a couple translucent overlapping shapes and some fairly small rectangles to make the design more interesting.

As soon as the lines started disappearing I realized that drawing them had been a good thing, they just weren't finished—they were just an intermediate step to a better version. The painting went from crap to promising in less than fifteen minutes once I started working on it. I realized then that I would start liking it again when it was a "good" design—one that I thought was interesting.

One more reminder to just keep painting when I do something that doesn't look good.

During this step I literally discovered red-oranges. For some reason I had really never gotten around to playing with red-oranges, and found several discernible hues I could reliably mix. That extended my palette enough to do a large number of unique rectangles without going all the way to red.

When I fixed all those problems, I noticed an as yet unnoticed grouping of rectangles that I wanted to repeat, so I found a similar grouping and re-colored it so it connected visually to the first one.

I've already used some of those red-oranges in another painting I'm in the middle of struggling with, so that was well worth the learning.

Villa Catalana at Sunset

Next day update (1/20/15):

As soon as I posted the painting (see below), I realized that it really wasn't showing the "color feel" I saw in my original photo of the scene, nor was it evoking the mood of the twilight. But, the difference was so subtle that my eyes couldn't register it, just looking from the painting to the photo on my computer. So, I took the original photo and the photo of the painting and viewed them side by side on my computer screen, and got this very interesting comparison:

Left: Painting  Right: Original photograph of the scene

The light bulb finally came on.

This morning I took the painting back into the studio and corrected the colors of the sky, the water, and some of the foliage, including taking down the turquoise of the spiky plant in the foreground. And after that round of corrections and yet another photograph, I realized that I had also not conveyed the warmth of the pavilion area and its reflection, and that they were also very important to the color scheme. So now it looks like this:

I may go back to it tomorrow and tried to even out the water. It was so pretty in the too-blue painting; at least the colors are correct now. Maybe I can make it pretty again.

It's all grist for the mill. Must keep grinding. How could I ever learn to see color without my computer?

END of update.

The Too-Blue Painting

This is the other painting I really wanted to do of the Villa Catalana paint out last summer. I took the photo from their patio, looking toward the west, in the long twilight. The lights were on in the pavilion, and although I couldn't see them from that angle, they were reflecting in the water. I was in love with all the colors, and the water, and the trees, and the perfect summer evening.

I'm staking out another desert painting for my next one.