Pushing paint around

First run at the canvas; taking a photo of it in progress revealed exactly where I needed to push the paint next. That was about 2,000 paint pushes ago......

How many times can you push a line or a shadow or a tiny dot of colour two microns from where it is now?

I would estimate at least 4,568. OK. I pulled that number out of the air. But being a perfectionist, it is not OK with me that a subject's eyes look 99 percent accurate. Of course, there is the dichotomy between objective reality, my own filter, the filter of the potential art lover whose requirements hover someplace above my right shoulder.....But still....

I am in the middle of a portrait which will be the second to last I complete before putting up a website of my portraits. I should have painted it back in, oh...maybe December. It's not that I don't want to put up the website and see who walks through the door for a portrait. And I've been paid, in the States, for portraits before. But then, it was just an adjunct to my two main professions, journalism and teaching horsemanship.  It was fun, and fun money. Now I'm getting serious, 30-odd years after finishing art school at the Art Students League of New York.

Now, painting has assumed a much greater importance. I gave up teaching riding seven years ago when I retired my jumper and married my husband. I could have ridden Major Yeats (yes, after the character played by Peter Bowles in The Irish R.M., both being large, no smarter than they needed to be, and handsome) for a couple more years. But I wanted the marriage to start well and go on forever, something the previous two had not done.

My horse looks just like that. Really. Or he would if he could wear a hat....

 
So, Yeats got to go to his retirement home younger than most show horses. He's there still, cared for by a very dear friend, another horsewoman who always loved him and whose husband has a huge dairy farm/small riding academy a mile from where Yeats was born in Virginia, USA. Yeats is happy; I'm a bit less so. I miss him desperately. When we still lived in the US, we would visit him about five times a year; it's a 10-hour round trip from where we lived in Maryland. But I haven't seen him since I landed in the UK on Nov. 20, 2009.

However, back to the easel. How many times can one push paint around? Until it dries, I guess. And if it's not right then, drag out the jar of gesso. And if it's still not right after another go...don't know. Never tried to gesso a used canvas TWICE. I guess the canvas then becomes something else. Trash. A semi-permeable liner for the cat's litter box. Something to put under the leaking lawn mower in the shed.

Meanwhile, time to finish my coffee (Verona, strong, with hot milk in my French breakfast cup...constitutes meal and/or snack), and push paint around for the 4,569th time today.

Major Yeats and me the day of his seventh birthday party (annual fundraiser called...of course...Major Yeats' Birthday Bash)--eons ago, in Virginia.