What if? What now?

'I like to spend a fair amount of time at my easel messing around. I wish I had a more impressive classification for it, but it really is just "messin' around".

​I have a few beloved themes that I return to over and over again, so it's fun (for me, at least) to start a familiar theme with the question, "What if?"  The objective is to paint the same-ol' same-ol' and make it not same-ol' same-ol'.

​Last week I took that approach to my curved shoreline with clouds  theme.

What Now?

You can see the result above. It's not finished. In fact, it's having a time-out. For me a painting goes into time-out when  I'm not entirely satisfied but don't know the answer to the  question, "What Now?'  ( I've had paintings in time-out as long as 9 months.)

The reality of the What if? approach to painting is that it's very easy to get started, For example, "What if I out line all the trees in red and all the clouds in blue?" Easy peasy, I outline all the trees in red and all the clouds in blue.  And I can continue to ask What if? over and over as I paint.   It can be huge fun with some exciting results.  But it's inevitable that at some point I'm  going to get to a place where I  want to finish the painting and have to answer the question, What now?  And that's a lot harder to answer.

Big hugs to everyone,
Maggie