Yesterday I wrote about a piece that I considered somehow incomplete and how I was hoping to somehow keep it from the failure pile. Afterwards I decided to take a look at some of the pieces that occupy this pile . Some are downright failures, just wrong in so many ways. Drab color. No sense of rightness in the lines of the composition. No focus, no point in the whole piece. Some are just bad concepts that just don’t mesh with my mind.
And then there are pieces like this fellow. It’s a smaller piece on paper, I think about 3″ by 7″, and was painted several years back when I was in the midst of my Outlaw series, a group of dark figures who often held guns. I remember very well painting this. There were things I very much liked in this piece but there were little flaws, little nagging details, that bothered me enough to hesitate in showing it in a gallery. I remember going back to this image many times back then, debating whether it worked for me. Ultimately, I moved him to the failure pile. Actually, it’s a bin but the pile sounds better.
Revisiting this piece is an interesting exercise. I still have many of those same reservations but I find myself really intrigued by this piece. It is probably destined to exist only in my bin but has something that strikes a chord for me nonetheless.
Redtree Times 