PAINTING THE SELF

Blogging is currently taking a back seat to real life. Am doing a self-portrait which I want to enter in this year's National Portrait Gallery BP Award and the deadline is in early March.

Painting from life is exhausting, at least to me. After only an hour's concentration I feel as if I've been plowing fields, chopping firewood, carrying buckets of water on my head and shearing sheep. Frequent coffee/tea/newspaper breaks are essential but tend to carry on too long and because of freakin short days of winter the light changes and so I have to turn on the electricity and then everything is different and so either I have to start again or stop for the day and do some drawings.

Here is a summary of what's been happening so far. I am not gloomy, it's just concentration that makes me look that way.

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HOW TO LOSE THE MYSTERY

I am ashamed of this stage. I hate it. I want to slash the canvas. I am posting it only as a lesson to myself, in order to give myself courage to proceed differently.

This is an example of exactly what I was saying not to do: losing the mystery, trying to "get it right", blah blah blah. Timidity, mediocrity, slavishness, fear of losing. I'm just plodding, plod plod. I don't care if you like it, I don't and I'm the one who decides.

This is not about pleasing others or being nice to one's self, non-judgemental. You have to be bloody judgemental if you're a painter and you know what you don't want to do and have at least an inkling of what you're trying to get at. I'm not talking about competence, skill, correctness, proportions, perspective, light & shade, any of those things, although what I'm talking about may or may not include them all.

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