Facing West

I've done a lot of paintings recently but haven't wanted to post any
of them. Or show them to anyone. They just didn't look like me or
I didn't recognize anything of me in them. And then it seemed I should
just accept that this is me, this is the way I paint. So I did and slowly,
it dawned on me that it was the paint itself or lack of painterliness
that was bothering me. I was using more and more paint with a
little walnut oil but the paint still seemed brittle and flat when it dried,
not juicy. This is painted over a previous image as an attempt to just
putter. It was fun to drag dark colors into and over lights and not worry
about overshooting edges, just keeping everything soft, finding an edge
if the composition seemed to need it. Most fun I've had in awhile.

Another Day in Paradise

It was fun to concentrate on color and making marks and not think 
at all about accuracy. I take photos of buildings all the time but I'm
not really interested in reproducing them on canvas. I've wasted a lot
of time moaning about not having a subject I'm excited about.
Then it struck me that I could assemble different architectural features to
give myself a structure to hang paint on. I drew a b&w composition in my
sketchbook and used it as a model. Color was made up and maybe it's
too simplistic but it's an experiment to alter my thought process, practice
straying from reality and try to get closer to a marriage of representation
and abstraction.