copyright 2011 Michael D. Smith

Paintings

Theater Set Drawing

Maybe I was trying to set some sort of personal size record and so offended the muse somehow, but when I painstakingly C-clamped the heavy awkward thing to a makeshift wall in my studio and finally took a look at it, I realized how bad it was. It was so large I could not get back far enough to take a decent picture of it, although I was able to glue two half shots together to get the above image. The painting was horribly dark and dull and static and ponderous, over-planned and … mediocre. I found myself unwilling to even look at the thing. The idea drawing from March 2011 shows more life than does this painting. I already knew it was a wrong-headed mistake, but when my wife Nancy gave some excellent comments on exactly why it was mediocre, I was consciously able to crystallize why I needed to cut the canvas in half and simply have fun doing some total sloppy improvisation on the each half.