Odd Problems

  Maybe it's just me. I don't claim to speak for every artist. I have some really strange problems at times. I started a painting last night. I had prepped several canvases, smearing them with paint to get rid of the oppressive white canvas and give me some colorful inspiration to get started. I had one canvas left. I had a lot of stress built up. I had a great reference photo. I needed to do some painting to get all of my inner planets aligned again. I put on some music, made myself comfortable in front of my easel, and sat the canvas in front of me. I sketched out the composition in black. (Inner voice: Hey, this is looking pretty good. Hell yeah!). I put on a bit of white to show the highlight areas. (Maybe I should mention here that I like to put paint on canvas and then use black and white as the highlight and lowlight. The color of the background becomes the midtone. I typically make adjustments after it's laid out). I was really happy with the way it looked. Very happy. Then it hit me: it was finished. I had spent more time getting set up than I did painting. Kind of frustrating. I had wanted to joust with this one a bit. Bend it to my will. Show it who was boss. Tweak each part of the face (you knew it was a face, didn't you?) until it looked perfect. But it already was perfect. There's never a commission that does this for me (to me?). Never a "you commissioned this yesterday and now it's finished and ready for you" . It only happens with my relaxation paintings. Maybe it's because I'm all stressed (which is relative, I'm not usually hanging by a mental thread, just hounded by daily life) and not paying as much attention to what I'm doing. Any way, it just struck me as oddly funny, the type of problem that (likely) only I have. Here's a picture of it (thanks to modern technology):

I had one last week that was about the same, only it did let me paint on it a little longer:

Probably not as good a painting as the top one, (certainly not as good in my opinion), but never the less it is finished. Thanks for stopping by to visit. I'm gonna go see what today brings me. More unique problems and challenges I'm sure.