Another New Year

All my New Years are good.  The fact that I have another New Year means I'm still going, at least for another day!  As the saying goes in the Navy, it's "another day to excel".  Another day to spend in the studio, or on my consulting business, or on projects around the house, whatever needs attention the most.  Another day, period.

My goal for this year is to focus less on my consulting business and more on my studio.  Specifically, I want to teach workshops in my studio, find at least one new gallery in a larger market, and do a lot more artworks than I did in the past year.  Sounds like some reasonable goals, but they're all going to take a lot of work.

Speaking of artwork, I just repainted a studio landscape from earlier in the year.  "Clouds over the French Broad River" (below) was a study of the way summer clouds glow in that brief moment right at sunset.  

It was an okay start, but there were a number of things that didn't work.  The blues and purples in the sky and in the reflections in the water were way too strong and overpowered the reds and oranges in the clouds.  The line of trees was too flat and unconvincing.  The shoreline in the lower left was too bright and drew attention away from the clouds.  The trees on the far right were just flat.  So, basically, everything needed to be repainted.

Here's the revised version.  The clouds have been changed to extend the crimsons and magentas further to the left.  The colors in the sky and water reflections have been toned down quite a bit and don't dominate the clouds.  The treeline has been changed and feels more like a real riverbank now.  The lower left corner has been darkened and the trees on the far right have been reworked.  All in all, it feels much better.

In addition to reworking this painting, I've destroyed three others.  Two were failures and I just painted over them.  Now I have two more boards ready to throw paint on.  The third painting was one of my old political satire paintings.  I had recently started to update it to address some of the political events of today, but realized that I didn't want to go down that particular road again.  So I stripped the painting off the stretcher bars.  I'm going to rework the frame and stretch new canvas over it since I've learned a lot about making better canvases in the last ten years.  Actually, there are several other large paintings on my storage rack that are just begging for the same treatment.  And when I get done with all of them, I'll have several new, large canvases ready for some kind of new effort, as well as several old canvases that will make a good bonfire.

Bring it on!