This is a new painting, a 24″ by 36″ canvas, that is going to the Kada Gallery as part of my upcoming show, Alchemy. Actually, it’s not a new painting. Most of it was painted in 2009 and was shown for a short time before coming back to the studio, where it has been for the last three years. It has been an enigma to me hanging on the wall there. It has a real oomph to it, a visual wallop in the color and form, but there was always something lacking. I finally determined that it was just too dark through the center. I had decided when I originally painted it that the darkness was where the piece was going and was integral to the painting. So I stopped at a point when I should have been forging onward.
It was one of those cases where I misread the painting and what it was telling me.
So this week I finally took it down and went back in, bringing light to the central swath of the painting. It created a huge change in the mood and impact of the painting, the Red Tree stepping forward from the shadow in which it was trapped for these years. It finally became the painting I was thinking it was when I cut short its creation back in 2009. It still has the darkness, mainly in the foreground, that I felt was integral to the painting’s impact but now, through the added light, it had greater depth into the scene. Everything just stands out so much better. The dynamism that I felt was there is now fully visible.
I’ve been fortunate that this doesn’t happen all too often, this misreading of one of my pieces. But if it has to happen, it is so gratifying to be able to revisit the painting to rectify the situation and reveal the truth of the painting that I had overlooked.
Here is the “before” image:
Redtree Times 