Warm Up Abstract Turns Bully

A while back I cut a number of placemat sized pieces of canvas from a roll just to have around for quicky sketches. I actually thought that once hand painted they would make interesting summer placemats. I really had my grandkids in mind as the artists, but they live all over the country and visit seldom which left them for me.

Clearing the deck for my new painting of my woods in summer, I used one yesterday in place of a water colour block to make a "palette print" from the paint left over from the floral painting. It came out muddy. I had over manipulated the colors till they produced grey; some pros call it mud. The piece needed a "touch of the artist", some of the pure colors that had made the grey added to bring it back to life. The hell with the placemat idea, I used my pastels--oil crayons would have been better, BUT I DIDN'T HAVE ANY. SEND THEM OVER DICK BLICK.

What had started out as a fool-around exercise became a painting and was now making demands. Somewhere during the process, all paintings take on a life of their own and start dictating. They become bullies pushing the artist into experimenting till she finds the correction that makes the composition copacetic. --And all this just because I was cleaning up on a quiet Sunday morning to make room for another trouble-maker that will be driving me crazy probably sometime next week?