you don't know dick

I finished a painting last night. I hadn’t intended to do such a thing, but it just sort of happened. I was working on another one when I realized what I was working on would never come together in the way that I wanted. That realization can be liberating and at the same time frustrating, for me it is more frustrating because I feel like I keep running into the same problems and there is no solution in sight. My frustration is primarily colour; I feel comfortable expressing and rendering objects in black and white with oil but when you add colour to the mix things just become overworked.
That has something that has been dogging me since I first took up a paint brush in the aught of 2001, and I just assumed it would work itself out. Maybe I should have taken colour theory, it might have helped but I don’t feel so bold when my palate is filled with such variety. I want my palate selection to be bold and slightly iconoclastic and I want my work to be loose and sketchy, like a drawing that just happens to be done in oil paint. That is something that has never happened, and it has always brought me to tears because I feel like I am unable to express the message I want to share.
As I was looking at my bungled efforts, I looked at the toned canvas in front of me, with the charcoal outline of the image pressed onto it. Something clicked as I grabbed it and began to apply paint onto it. I used what I had on hand, salmon pink, yellow ochre, raw umber, flake white replacement, mars black, and Venetian red to quickly transfer the image in my mind’s eye into this living breathing world. I fought the compulsion to add more, stepped back and sighed; because here after all these false starts and frustrations was something that looked like I intended. It is such a relief.