Salvaging - I Mean Transforming

Some artists like to produce their paintings all in one session, i.e. "alla prima."   They dislike revisiting a piece to make adjustments or changes, especially since the base painting is no longer wet.  I was surprised to learn this, because in most cases, I love coming back to a painting for subsequent iterations, especially because the paint is now dry.

If I am not crazy about my first effort, I will set it aside and let it dry, rest, cure, etc..   I don't even like to see a first try painting in my line of sight for at least a few days.  There is sure to be more clarity around what is good and what has to change when returning to a painting with fresh eyes. 

Iteration 1

This painting was begun in my Friday morning class.   There were forsythias and daffodils galore in class that day.   The pure, fresh color of "just cut" blooms almost had a satiny glow.      The cloth background was a warm complementary purple.    There was a clear glass cruet on the right and a blue-green pottery vase on the left.  Iteration 1 shows the painting after the first session.  See why I don't like "alla prima?"   I need "molte," many.

Painting the lit petals that were bright white and bright yellow was straightforward. The shadowed petals were the challenge. It's hard to paint dark white, and dark yellow - counter-intuitive really.   Flicking my eyes back and forth between the set up and my painting revealed that the dark white and dark yellow were not white and yellow, but blue-green, and raw sienna respectively.   

Iteration 2

A few days later I came back to the painting and decided that unless I applied some salvage techniques, I wouldn't want to hang it as is.   I found the background unattractive so I would make a drastic change to it.   Why not put a framed painting behind my forsythia?  I made the edges of the frame fuzzy and the main color blue so that this background painting would not compete with the bright flowers, but be an area that my eye would go back to after digesting the flowers.  Iteration 2 is to the right.


At this point, I felt like I was closer to being done.  The four final problems I saw in Iteration 2 that I fixed in Iteration 3 follow:

1) The right hand edge of the daffodil on the table is almost exactly the same shape as the cruet.   That's bad.  I overlapped them.

2) The white daffodil petal shadows are too light.  I darkened them.

Iteration 3  Final?

3) The shape of the rightmost lit petal is too elongated.  I rounded it off more.

4) Notice how the stem of the daffodil on the table is the same light color all the way to the flower.  The stem needed to be shadowed from the petals closest to it.


So salvaging - I mean transforming - in multiple (molte) painting sessions can be fun and rewarding.   The good is preserved;  the bad is tweaked or even drastically altered.   It's all up to the boss of the painting - me.