Monday, July 23, 2007

Chaplin Glazed

The Chaplin picture is now glazed although the bright red neck definitely suffers from the lack of planning the colours beforehand. On Sunday I glazed the top layer on another new picture called The Time For Love Has Nearly Flown and today had a few disasters and partly damaged one nice underpainting with a failed attempt to glaze with opaque colours (this is not too bad because the picture was a study for the big Saint Andrew painting to test this very idea). The second of today's was an underpainting of a dandelion and an arrow which I rather rushed, although it was not complicated. So three less than ideal pictures in four days and so overall today is a miserable day. It seems that two out of every three paintings are more of a lesson in disappointment than the great artworks I always desperately aim for. However I can gain some solace by looking back at famous pictures of the past, each with their failures and mistakes glaring the world in the face, and know that perfection will always be as elusive as antiperfection, total disaster.