A tropical landscape this time. I’ve been holding on to a few photos I took of flowering Royal Poinciana trees at Pigeon Island National Park in St. Lucia for some time now, so I was excited to finally get a chance to work on one. I have of course painted the flowers before en masse (see some at www.bluerootsartstudio.com/portfolio), but this is the first landscape which features the trees.

I was trying to listen to some meditation sounds & music while painting, but for some reason the kids were just so loud last night, I kept getting interrupted. Still, I think I’m on to something… that zen feeling was so close I could taste it! When my little guy came by to ask for his 12th snack of the day (he’s part hobbit), I put the headphones on him & he tried to run off with them, he didn’t want to give them back!

I enjoyed taking a much looser, painterly approach to this painting, though I did get caught up in the trap of noodling around with it too much, and only really stopped because it was 1:30am! That could be due to the size (another 11″x14″), or because my flow was disrupted so often. I really do need to start earlier in the day for this to really work for me, but it’s tricky because I prefer to photograph the painting by natural light in the morning, then I write the blog post, and put the link in several places, answer some e-mails etc. Have lunch, do errands, get started on a new painting, get kids from school … madness ensues … paint some more … dinner, activities … paint some more … what the kids are still up?

Then I either put them to bed & go to bed myself, or in the case of a larger painting, I try to get back to noodle a little more. One thing that I hoped to get out of this challenge of daily painting … of finishing a small painting every day … was that I could paint while the kids were at school. Usually I spend a couple weeks on a painting, and I can get obsessive, painting an area over & over (noodling), until I’m relatively happy with it. I’m hoping to find more balance, not be such a perfectionist. Not that it isn’t a valuable trait for a painter, and not that great paintings don’t need time to evolve, but I want to be more decisive with my strokes. Economical but effective brushstrokes … that’s something to aim for.