It's Not Like Riding a Bike

When you get back in the studio again after a too-long hiatus, painting doesn't happen easily. Rediscovering myself as an painter after many months has been hard -- it is not like riding a bike or a horse after many years, because it is not totally instinctive or rote. Although the rituals of working in the studio and the basic skills are always there, they need to be encouraged back to the forefront. And there must be inspiration, a muse if you will. But I think the inspiration  and excitement are coming back, in that once again I have some ideas, and I WANT to paint.

I decided that in order to free myself up, I really needed to work large for a time. So I  started work on a very large piece, almost 5 feet high. I am painting over an old abstract 
canvas I did back in the 80's which never worked for me, and which  is  partially overlayed with tissue paper, to provide texture. 

At first it was a disaster. Nothing came together.  The first 
couple of forays into the studio left me feeling as if I was 
just wasting a lot of time and paint. Because of its size, I 
found I was working the canvas in quarters, and not really "feeling it" as a whole. I worked it upside down for a time,
 to keep it from becoming too representational.


 I had started out doing another forsythia to combat the three feet of snow around my house, claiming every view from the windows, but my heart was not in it, and what I ended up with just sort of evolved by playing with the paint. 

I think about California a lot with half my family now living there, and somehow this piece speaks to that emotional 
connection. It is now in the "take it down from the studio 


and look at it for a week" stage, but I think it is finished. It is tentatively titled 

             " Trees make a long shadow and a light sound"





And now, a few small winter scenes to finish, and onward to  abstracted seascapes for the Nantucket gallery.