And for today's painting:
The setting is outside and the man is pouring tea from a teapot. I had started off painting exactly that and then things took a journey of their own and I followed. I am always curious to see how a painting develops. I like playing video games - strategy, building, etc - and I find painting is very similar, only better. With a video game, you sort of know what is likely to happen because the game has a title and a genre and usually fits into a format or layout similar to other such games.
In a painting, there is the support, the medium and then the size. But then, after that, anything can happen, including staring at the canvas for days and days or splashing paint all over it in whatever colours appeal to me at the moment and then taking it from there. The staring then happens when there is actually something to look at on the support, hopefully giving a hint of an idea. Sometimes, I play with the splashes and drips and things emerge, sometimes I just try to develop the notion of the idea that is hinted at on the canvas.
Sometimes after working on a painting for weeks or months, I realise that absolutely nothing is happening or going anywhere or that I have made some major mistakes that have thrown everything off. When this happens, sometimes the canvas just hangs there for months while I pretend to myself that I can 'fix' it, until I have to admit that I either cannot or will not because I have moved on to something else; and sometimes, it is so bad that I take it down, fold it up and stash it somewhere feeling very guilty at having failed so miserably and wasted all that good paint and the canvas. Once I actually put the rather large canvas on the floor, squirted detergent all over it and proceeded to 'clean' it with a brush. It occurred to me after about half an hour that the soap would probably make the canvas unsuitable for paint and so I did the fold up and stash. I keep my smaller mistakes and failures - there is always something to be learned - but I cannot see myself unrolling a 2 metres by 1 metre 50 canvas just to see how bad it was.
The up side of all these failures and mistakes is that they are all part of the progression and some were actually very enjoyable to paint even though at some point I realised how bad they were or that I had completely lost the thread. I have not yet made a painting I am completely happy with and so there is always the next one that will be better or the next one or the next one. It is a fantastic journey.