Girl Garden: Painting on Cardboard

I Beg Your Pardon.  I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. But a Girl Garden… That I Can Do!

(Remember This?)

(Look Again. Ta-Da!)

As Promised…A Painting! Realio, trulio! I finished it several weeks ago, actually. At least, I finished the literal “it”. But. I want to do the abstract it (the philosophical it?) again, bigger (like a few feet’ X several more feet’). So in that sense, it isn’t finished. It’s a study.

Saying I painted a study makes me sound so…highbrow (think Monet’s cathedrals).  Which isn’t a bad strategy; in a sense, I’m creating my own artistic chi.

This little (8″ X 10″) Girl Garden painting is oil on gessoed cardboard (the texture is from tissue paper saturated with and embedded in the gesso). Cardboard implies transience, seems temporary…but really, since it is sturdy cardboard and was coated with a couple good coats of gesso before I dabbed oils on, it could qualify as archival…if I wanted to claim that kind of status for it. Which is always tempting. Just typing “archival” fills me with historical longingness. But no, I’m calling it a study. I’d like to do it again, much, much bigger, and a little more myopic. Close up.

Critique:  I’m not totally pleased with how I divided the space. Like I said, I’d like it a little more myopic, for the important shapes to fill more ground (leaving less negative space? making more positive? so karmic). Also there’s an awkwardness in the hands that I’m not sure pleases me entirely—it might even displease me, though I could say, with a diffident shrug, that it’s disarmingly endearing in its whimsical naivete (which is a line I’m almost sure could be found in a Coldwater Creek catalog). But next time, I think I’ll be handier.

Positive Note: I could cite Roald Dahl as inspiration, which is definitely good. Also, there’s some 30’s waif vibes going on, also good.

This Little Zinnia Painting Was My Warm-Up:

I know it’s rose season. But I like painting zinnias. And doing this painting first helped me find my colors, though initially, I disliked the painting itself. A lot. I’d painted quickly, hoping not to get caught in a creative OCD downward spiral. Discouraged, I put the zinnia down and washed my hands and looked at other things and squinted into the middle distance, and then picked it up again and scrawled charcoal lines into the wet oil and liked it better, but still not much. It grew on me eventually. After I’d started the next study. And it got kinks out of my system, so that when I painted the Girl Garden, I was enjoying myself.

How do you tackle your creative OCD? Surely I’m not alone in the universe, searching for artistic chi…