Studio Update: On Pushing Through Painting Roadblocks

Warning! You may need dramamine to watch this. It's just a quick video update and it is a bit (to put it nicely) shaky. But, hey, it's free content! Anyhow, here's an update from my studio.

Things didn't go according to plan while working on a recent landscape oil painting. In disgust and frustration I sloughed through and "finished" the painting and then set it aside. I was tempted to trash it altogether, but in retrospect that would have been hasty. Though the painting itself was not what I wanted, it was a learning experience that will benefit me on future paintings.

Because of the "beating" I took in this last attempt at realism, I decided to take a brief break from realism, and try a few abstract paintings. These are fun to do, and I learn about color, application, texture, and composition without stress. It doesn't take as much skill to do an abstract painting (there, I said it), but that doesn't mean no skill is needed. There's still much that can be learned from doing abstracts.