Painting a Day, Day 28

Half Shell, 6×6, oil on gessoboard, $75 [button link=”http://www.dailypaintworks.com/fineart/denise-hopkins/half-shell/218059″ type=”big”] Buy Now[/button]

I started this painting weeks ago. It has stared at me daily as I painted my birds.  I didn’t think I’d revisit it because, well, I’m just not that into oysters anymore.  But then I painted a couple of dabs here and there as I was working on something else and, voila!  The shells started to emerge in a way they hadn’t before.  I was hooked.  Not so much on oysters but on texture and color.  Worked on it for over an hour when originally I’d set out to do something else.  

Which is what I love most about a painting a day.  Abandoning and then revisiting. The fact that there is always tomorrow.  Possibility.  Resurrection.

I’ve got some pretty emotional pieces on the horizon.  One I’ve been thinking about a lot is a painting whose face has been against the wall of my bedroom and behind the dresser for months now, hidden but present.  A portrait.  Of me and my, as the annulment paper’s like to call it, “former spouse”.  I want to paint over it, but I’m not ready for that kind of emotional investment, and I’m not sure what to paint on top of it.  It isn’t that I want to “erase” the past or, worse, pretend it didn’t exist.  But I do want move beyond it, somehow honor it, and yet, re-envision its impact on my future.  Even typing that feels too heavy.  But May?  I think in May I’ll pull it out, let it face forward, look it in the face for the first time in a year and then, try, really try, to make something beautiful.