After all of that rush last week, some house guests arrived, and all of my resolutions to step up the pace of my production was lost in the wind, amid lovely beach lunches and long evening talks.  These interruptions, delightful as they are, spell disaster for my production rhythm and I must learn somehow to manage them more efficiently.  For, despite our lovely guest's departure on Saturday, here I am on a Tuesday, barely hobbling back to work.  Truly the obstacles that keep me away are ludicrous, and mostly in my own head.  Well, enough about the psycho barriers...here is today's work.

Veronica V
here is today's canvas number two.  well actually I started with the background on this one.  I think the fact that the image has no face helped me detach from that urge to get the features in first.  anyway, I think it is quite promising, so much so that I then applied a similar background to Veronica III (see the Veronica page), and I am quite happy with that too.  Anyway, I feel like I have managed to shift myself out of slow gear and have had a productive day.  But now it is time to go back downstairs and play mommy...

Veronica IV
my goal today is to start working faster.  i feel i have been getting bogged down into detail forsaking the larger goal which is one of yes, breathlessness, but still fluid, moving, waving, fluttering. I am going to try to start 2 paintings today, and get them up and running by means of quick oil sketches in transparent colors directly on the canvas, no ground, no gridding...no corrections yet either, just fast sketching, so i must hush my constant inner critic and just go for the guinness book of world records in terms of painting time...see how that goes...
it is amazing the things that one comes up with when shut up alone in a studio all day...

Today's session was very tough.  yes, I did finish up the arm and the stomach and blocked in the hands, though they are still a bit clumsy.  I even indulged myself by starting in on ALL the bubbles and bracelets, to see whether a bit of fun might not get me going again... maybe I just need to stop looking at it for now...
I am thinking of glazing the entire body.  The thing that has been most difficult for me in this image has been the color of the skin, having a different hue that what I am used to, especially in the shaded areas.  I feel I should unify the universe (an expression developed during my painting studies days) and glazing might just be it.  stay tuned.

For this image I wanted to go back to the patterning of the skin by means of light.  I started out more realistic, then added the light lines just as I saw them, then began to alter the colors to make them my own, leaning towards purple, indian yellow, teal and green.  Oh, yes, there is a bit of flesh color just to tie the various bits together, like islands of color floating gently on the surface of Veronica's skin...it is a slow process, this building up of patterns, and adjusting each color as it sits next to the others and the growing tension between decoration and description is the best part.
P.S. I got her expression back!