At some point, I suspect everyone has heard the familiar idiom: ‘practice makes perfect.’ It’s a mantra thrown about frequently for anyone attempting to learn a new skill. Frankly, I think it’s a crock, and I’ll tell you why: if you ever think your work is perfect, then give up and go home as you’ll stop growing as an artisan or worse yet, become complacent and your quality will suffer while the world passes you by. Thus, I prefer the simple statement that practice brings improvement.

When I set about to begin painting again after not having touched them in twenty years, I knew my meager skills from high school had completely fallen aside and that I would have work to do to get even those back. When I left high school, my most accomplished piece of art was painting one of those little bears with hats that used to be in the art school ads in the TV Guide so I knew I had a lot of room to grow!  Thus it was with a bit of hesitation that I invested the dollars needed to purchase my first supplies. Even harder was getting over the fear of how badly it might turn out and touching brush to canvas.

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I was watching TV with my little girls, and while they were enjoying ‘Sydney White’ I was playing with my oil paints. The use and blending of color fascinates me and I am trying to find better ways of using it. That’s actually the primary reason why I moved to oils from acrylics. So as a quick project, I painted this 5×7″ canvas of dreamscape clouds. I over-blended while softening and killed some of the vibrancy, but I still think it’s pretty. My nine-year-old has decided that it’s hers when it’s fully cured so I guess I might need to do more! What do YOU think?

‘Peaceful Mountain River - The Oil and Oval Edition!’
Oils on Canvas - 16″ x 20″

Much as I’d love to have written about my first, it’s destruction was mentioned in the last post! After the loss of my first painting immediately after painting it and before I had a picture (I was going to take one when it was in it’s drying location), I wasn’t going to worry about painting anymore tonight. However, lying on the couch watching TV, it began to nag at me that I had promised myself that I’d have an oil painting to show at the end of the weekend and I still didn’t have one! So I got set up again and was going to repaint the original but decided I didn’t want to do that again since I had spent plenty of time earlier doing it. Instead, I decided to revisit my current favorite view: the peaceful mountain river. I thought it would be a good exercise to see how well I could do in oils what I had already done in acrylics. I am very pleased with the results.

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