Who’s Winning…Watercolor or Me?

I am still working in watercolor…or  I should say, trying to work in watercolor.  One day it is encouraging the next my hands are thrown up in frustration. But, it is getting better. I am learning how this medium works and when I do it right, I love it.  Will it ever be my number one choice for painting?  Not sure.  Acrylics have been my choice for so long and are so comfortable, that I’m not sure they will ever be kicked out of first place. It has been a long time since I worked in oils and am thinking of trying that again also.  I purchased some Golden Open Acrylics that reportedly are very much like working with oil, in that they remain blendable and workable for much longer than regular acrylics. So they are next on my list of things to try, but in the meantime,  watercolor is still fascinating and torturing me.  It’s a love/hate relationship but love is winning out. So, maybe in the end we will both win…watercolor and me.

Yesterday, I posted a watercolor study of a sunflower on Facebook (my personal page) and my friends loved it and someone even wanted to buy it!  I have good friends…I love them.  It was actually a photo of the unfinished work and the finished work was not worthy of praise. Not knowing when to stop ruined it. The painting was never planned to be a finished piece but an experiment in working wet into wet, using the negative space technique and working looser and more impressionistically.  The study was a success. A lot was learned, but I didn’t know when to stop and messed it up. Still, the work as photographed before I went too far, received praise from some artist friends whose work I greatly respect and admire. So, there is that and I will definitely take it.  Here’s the piece I posted yesterday…

Messy and bright and the more I look at it, the more I like it. Definitely, not perfect, not a masterpiece and not meant to be either, but a pretty good experiment so I will claim it and be happy with it.

Today’s piece is of the same subject: Sunflowers…this time many of them in a field. My inspiration was a photo of mine from several years ago of a beautiful field of sunflowers that I used to pass every day going to work.

The locals in my town are familiar with this field and we all love it. It doesn’t have sunflowers every year but when it does, people drive for miles to see it and photograph it.  Not sure my painting does it justice but at least it stirs up the same feelings in me that the real field invokes and that was what I was hoping to accomplish.  Is it perfect? No, but I wasn’t going for perfection, quite the opposite, and my main satisfaction with this piece is that it didn’t get ruined by my attempt at perfectionism.  That makes me happy.

So, I am grateful that I am working again, grateful that my friends encourage me and grateful to be doing something that I love so much.

On a completely different subject, but one in the forefront of a lot of our minds these last few days,  I am praying for all of those affected by the senseless tragedy in three of our country’s cities.  What can be done?  It’s hard to know what we can do when people who have so much hatred in their hearts can kill innocent people this way.  I keep thinking that the shooters had no hope. No hope that their lives would be better, that our country would get better or that anything mattered.  A lack of hope can make you desperate and desperate people do crazy things. It is easy to lose hope when we live in a world where social media makes it so easy to be hateful and divisive and so very easy to disconnect from people.  It is also easy to lose hope when you put your faith in people and politics and governments. They will fail you every time.  My hope remains in Christ and I know that I know that He will never fail me. Until next time,

Blessings,

Vicki