May 8th-12th, 2014
Lake of the Woods, Ontario
24 x 30 in, Oil on Canvas
(sold)

I began this on a Thursday afternoon, getting the sky and treeline in I think – then I was too busy with teaching all day Friday to work. Because it’s been so warm, the paint was drying quickly so I had to bring it with me to Essex and work on it there, or waste the canvas. So I brought it and worked there, but had so many little things go wrong that I was seething mad at everything. When a fellow painter came up to make a kind observation about my work, I growled at him. Literally. This is what comes of spending more time with dogs than people. Anyway – Saturday I labored over the water, got the beach in – I worked all day Sunday and again Monday, several portions I had to scrape off and re paint because they had dried (with the knife, you can’t paint over dry paint – at least, I can’t / won’t.) I worked on it Tuesday too, when finally my shipment of paint arrived and I could scrape off the strange, marshmallow-fluff like new-low-standard white paint from Georgian and replace it with quality. Although I believe this is pleasing to the eye, it is not my favorite. I like my work best when in flows in uninterrupted bursts of energy. This one felt way too labored. Hopefully in a few weeks I’ll be there in person, and have a whole new slew of reasons to kvetch about the state of my painting!