Time to change your perspective

Well, I went into the studio nice and early today, full of good intentions, determined to let abundance flow through me onto the canvas.  I gessoed over a couple of canvases and set them aside to dry, imagining what fun I might have with them later.

But first I decided to make for myself a little cheat sheet of all my blues and yellows: since those are mostly what I paint with, I thought it might be useful to have a way of seeing how they show themselves on the page.

And that was all well and good, so based on those results I thought I'd try a new combination. And that's where things began to go wrong: the blue wasn't quite what I expected, so I mixed it, and the yellow wasn't quite what I expected, so I mixed it, and then somehow things just kept going south. I found myself falling into old patterns, forcing things to look a certain way (and failing)... Definitely a disappointing day.

So what, in the words of my esteemed husband, did I learn from this? I should probably stop playing on these small canvases (which is where I go when I'm not feeling confident enough to tackle the larger ones). I should probably give myself permission to play in the happier colors, even though I tend to feel apologetic about being so often stuck in the aqua zone. I should stop trying to replicate what's been done before: water on these thin layers of gesso, the white around the edges... not really working for me now.

Sigh. Maybe I just need some outside time...

But actually, later on, when I did my usual trick of rotating a painting to see how it works upside down and sideways, I discovered I loved the upside-down version of one of them (see above). It looks a bit like boats in a harbor at sunrise -- to me, anyway -- and I find I actually love the colors. I like the painting. A lot! Surprise!

So there you go: perhaps the most important lesson learned is that just because things didn't turn out the way you planned them, that doesn't mean the situation is irredeemable. Sometimes you just need to walk away for a bit, think about something different, come back to it and look at it from a different angle: it may turn out to be exactly what you wanted -- or needed -- you just didn't realize it. A useful object lesson, I think, for times when nothing seems to be going the way anyone expected it to go.