"A painting a day" or, "there are some paintings I just have to fling like a frisbee into the trash"

I'm feeling a little stuck lately. I was plugging away at the Dinner still life when I decided to add the magpie. Then I felt inspired. I knew what I was going to paint next. I researched it, built my support, prepared it, and sat down to paint...

Nothing.

I changed my direction. Searched some new sources, sketched out an image and began applying paint. It didn't work. The oil dried instantly, as if I was working with acrylic paint. A little research led me to conclude that the support needed some more preparation...A sizing to prevent the gesso from over absorbing the oil paint I was applying.

But still the whole process didn't feel very inspiring.

So here I was again with a blank canvas. After a few feeble efforts, I began a second painting of the same Dinner still life from a different point of view. A little boring? Perhaps.

I sat down to work on that reincarnation of the Dinner scene again today, and just started wondering what I was doing.

"What am I doing?"

So I bumbled around on the internet for a while and found a pretty interesting blog. http://duanekeiser.blogspot.com/ This guy is making a painting a day. And while I am not interested in the idea so much, I am interested in the work. It's beautiful. And perhaps best viewed by visiting his blog and clicking on the Archives link in the righthand column. It takes you to thumbnails of all his paintings organized by month. I think his work tells me that it doesn't matter what you paint, but rather how.

So here is what I sat down and wrenched out of my brush today. Yes, it was painful. And yes, I think it belongs to that category of "bad paintings".

I guess it's true. "Everyone just has a certain number of bad paintings in them. Get them out, and move on." Good advice from an old friend of mine.