Day 33. There Will Be Time…

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“…There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea…”
–“Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” T.S. Eliot

The image above isn’t day 33’s painting. It’s what I want day 33’s painting to look like. I cropped the real image so that you couldn’t see my enormous compositional mistake. The entire painting is right heavy, completely off balance. I think I originally had bigger plans for the bird’s tale to bring the eye back. If I make a grave error in a painting, I usually fix it or abandon it and start another.

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The entire 11×14 painting. The bird needs to be in the bottom left area as the branch and beak lead up and to the right.

I didn’t have the time on this one, so rather than have an empty day 33 (a thought that fills me with with horror and dread) I thought, instead, I’d share with you a painting that went a little wrong. I like the colors and I’m happy with the palette knife work particularly in the background. It’s possible I could re-stretch the image onto a smaller frame to create a better composition. But for now it’s enough to remember that I can’t produce 100 perfect paintings– that as grandiose as I sometimes make my project out to be in my head, sometimes I’m just wondering through “half-deserted streets”. It’s good, I suppose, every once in a while to get outside my own interior monologue of should I do this? Should I re-do that?

Which, in the end, is what daily painting did for me. It took what ran rampant in my head and gave it physical form. No longer living in what-if, limitless visions, my ambitions take physical form, for good or for bad, but have cumulatively and ultimately led me to new visions, new revisions, which in turn get to be realized. That, is progress. That makes me want to do it again and again and again.

Today I don’t have time. But there most certainly will be.

Picture of Denise Hopkins

Denise Hopkins

May 3, 2015

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