a painting I went back into

I painted this painting in oil close to ten years ago for a show at Brevard College (my first alma mater). Tim Murray had arranged for me to have a large show there and I was pleased to work up 19 paintings and 60-some drawings and watercolors. This painting, and I admit to an appropriationist streak, was a take on Raphaelle Peale's After the Bath (at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City) - nude behind curtain. I added a cello and altered the color, and the drape was initially a landscape painting, and I enlarged the space of the room. Peale's work is a trompe l'oeil bit of handkerchief covering the nude (not many nudes survive from the early years of the republic: Vanderlyn and Washington Allston being rare exceptions).
This painting kicked around for a decade - shown a couple of times, hung up or stored away. Recently I was painting in my studio, our backyard garage, and seeing it lurking behind a ladder, feeling the despair of its existence, put it on the easel and added a big slathering of paint over the landscape and two verticals of green, a vertical of red and another of blue. I preserved the cello.
Several nights that week, as I was venturing off to sleep, I thought about this painting. Mostly I saw the white paint in the middle, which I hoped would be more active and watery than it is. When I was in the midst of painting it (in acrylic this time, a no no, but after 10 years the oil paint has cured surely) I added the bars of color to simplify things, to help the painting breathe. All in all, I think it's better. I searched for a jpg of the original state but couldn't find it. Ten years is the longest intervening time I've experienced with a painting - although I have a watercolor that is an experiment in chance that I've been "working on" for 6 years now.
I wish this painting well.

Five Years Ago

Five years ago I painted this painting before I went to seminary. It's a 15 by 20 inch painting in oil of some trees and the paint is laid on thickly. I remember when I painted it. I was using the carport at my dad's house as my studio and I was painting during the Summer. I painted at night, when the air cooled down. An owl screeched overhead and tree frogs made a steady pulse of sound. I've thought that this painting isn't quite finished, but so many people react positively to it, I think it would be a shame to do anything to it. Someday I'll get back to oils. Acrylics offer immediate results, but oils offer an elasticity of approach. I can lay my brushes down and come back hours later and the paint's still alive. Sometimes I feel that oil paint is more real. Acrylic is plastic and no matter how good a painting is, the surface doesn't feel hard enough. Still acrylic is great for using in poorly ventilated spaces - which is what I've had for some time. Acrylic is also portable in a way that oil isn't.