A Work In Progress

Recently I started painting again.  When I was in high school I would paint all the time, and I just loved being creative.  Somewhere along the way the crazy schedule of college, life and the lack of money for supplies put to much distance between me and art that I pretty much forgot about it and how much fun it can be to create.

After living in our house for five years I have finally decided to put the finishing touches on a few walls I always felt needed a little something to fill the space.  I looked all over for affordable art: garage sales, Goodwill, online, Etsy.  I found so many things that would be just perfect, but none of them were anything I could afford.  So I gave up and decided to buy some canvas and paint in the colors that would get best in the spaces and paint something myself.

The first thing I painted came out ok on this 24x36 canvas.  I wasn't super happy with the turn out but the colors work so I decided to hang it anyway.  It now resides over my couch in the living room.  If you look at it upside down it sort of resembles a rotten banana, because of this I named the painting "The Wrong Banana."

On to working on something to hang in the dining room.  There is this wall space above the bookcase that looks very unbalanced with the dark bookcase below so I decided to put something there to help balance the space.  I got a canvas that I believe is 18x36 and went to work on it not really knowing what to do with it.

I started out painting colorful circles all over the canvas, and filled in the spaced in between with black.  After standing back to look at it I found that it didn't really look like it was was it was suppose to be.  I grabbed a 4 inch paint brush left over from painting the walls in the house and swiped it back and forth across the canvas.  For some reason the speech from Independence Day kept going through my mind.  "We will not go quietly into the night!  We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on."  So I decided to name the painting "We will not go silently into the night" and it kind of looks like the colors are trying their best to pull themselves out of the blackness. Overall it came out a lot darker than I thought it would; but my thought on painting is that I can decide to paint and what colors to use, but the painting decides what it is going to be.