Keeping hope alive

After spending the morning browsing other abstract artists on Instagram, I came into the studio determined to loosen up a bit and have fun.

I chose an old canvas, one of Michael's cheap varieties, that had a lot of yellow on it. And, having noticed that what appealed to me this morning was a sort of spruce green shade, I mixed that up, brushed it on, and started scraping it off; so much fun!

I think the whites in the lower left are a little too intentional; not as free as the strokes coming from the upper right, so I might work on this some more; we'll see.

What I love is that the scraping has the same unpredictability I can get with a palette knife and thick paint: the painting feels like it's sort of painting itself, instead of me forcing it to behave in a particular way... And I do like the way the yellow underneath shows through.

At the same time, it reminds me of a thought I had while posting my other blog this morning; a sense of this... thicket we have to get through to get to the peace of sleeping beauty on the other side.  Which might come from a text a friend sent last night, in which he said, "Like all things, this WILL pass -- we just have to stay healthy until then."

I have to believe that somehow we will make it through, and in the meantime we just need to muddle through as best we can, taking whatever precautions we can and helping in any way we can. Maybe those light intentional strokes in the lower left are my efforts, however clumsy, to keep hope alive.

Learnings: let a finished painting sit a while before you "fix" it.
                  I really need things NOT to be so balanced, but something in me strives for that.
                  Scraping is fun but you need to vary shape and direction within colors, not between them.