sum

There's nothing like checks and balances. If I thought the first paintings in this series were a snap, then the recent ones have been exacting more than their pound of flesh. This one is called Sum because it represents the end of the growing season: the sum of all the changes and effort (of both man and nature) needed to get to this point. As for the sum of hours it took to paint this one, don't even ask.

A friend remarked recently that my painting shows a completely different side of me than my writing. In a nutshell she stated that the ironic tone of my writing is entirely absent in my painting. Naturally this got me thinking and I started assessing the painters and authors whose work I admire. It seems to me that while I am a junkie of humour and wit in both art and lit, it's the purely emotional (to use Carla's words) that hits home for me at the end of the day. The writers and artists whose work I return to consistently dig deeper. (And they avoid mixed metaphors like the plague:)

In my own case, it feels like the two disciplines exist on different mental planes: writing is an exercise for the intellect and the funny bone: words are for play and not for work. I never agonise. It ain't my artform. But painting draws on something that has nothing to do with my brain, though I do pretend to use it when coerced into writing an artist's statement*. And unlike writing, I obsess over every mistake and every success, and each painting has a thousand.

*In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. ~ George Orwell