Letting go – Daily Painting day 168

If you let go a little you will have a little happiness. If you let go completely you will be free.
Ajahn Chah

New theme started on January 1st, and I’m happy to finally tell you the details. Instead of picking a specific subject to paint, forcing myself to complete a painting a day or painting for x amount of minutes, I’ve decided to set myself free, and not have a theme at all. 

I’ve been doing monthly themes now since I started the 365 day project back in July. I’m ready for a break. It’s possible that I might want or need that kind of structure/discipline again sometime down the road, and if I do, I’ll reconsider. For now, it’s overwhelming enough knowing that I’ve locked myself into painting every day for 365 days, I don’t need more rules, restrictions, regulations, and/or challenges on top of that. 

I’m ready to go a bit easier on myself, and just start winging it without any preconceived expectations. Whatever’s going on in my studio will be blog fodder for that day. For confidentiality reasons, I can’t show you the custom or contractual work I do, but I can show you lots of other things. Sooo, let’s get started.

Since it’s a new year, I’ve been going through my inventory, and pulling paintings I don’t like to revise them. I started with the blue floral painting you see above – Floral No 279. It’s a 12×9 inch panel. I liked the flowers, sorta, but the problems I saw: it was too dark, the vase was too thin and set back too far. It had to go. This is what I did to revise it..

Meh. Still didn’t like it, but I wasn’t sure what I could do to make it better. It’s been kicking around on my work table now for a week or more. Today I looked at it, and something finally clicked. I thought, the flowers have to go. No wonder I don’t like it, this painting wasn’t meant to be a floral. So, I turned it into this abstract…

Work in progress
daily painting: 365 day art project
Day 168

I’m starting to warm up to it, in a small way. It’s not finished yet, so I’ll keep working on. The real fun part? I’m recording the process on my iPhone, and I’ll be uploading it to my poor, neglected youtube channel. It’s been 6 months since I uploaded a video. I plan on changing that this month. 

A sneak peek of my work table before I started recording
🙂 

If you’re into YT, subscribe to my channel, so you don’t miss any of the new videos I’ll be posting. I’ll be posting willy nilly because I don’t want to be tied down to any strict schedule. All I can say is I’ve already filmed a bunch of stuff that I’ll be uploading as soon as I get it edited. 

I’m looking forward to a hodgepodge of writing, photos, and videos. I’m not sure if I’ll be blogging daily or not..my guess at this time is no. If I have something large to post, I’ll post daily. If not, I’ll cobble several days together into one post. 

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