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Well, it turns out that maybe essence is not always the driving force….

These two watercolors are, at best, simple results of a painting exercise and at worst the end product of just plain goofing off. They are learning experiences, so they cannot be called failures for that reason.  As finished paintings, though? To me - Bleah.

Here’s the story. One well known technique to break free from routine involves three steps:

1. Take no more than three colors and apply them in a random pattern – the bigger the better.  Don’t overwork it, just let the colors do whatever. The whole thing should take no more than two or three minutes. The trick is to have no preconceived notion of shapes or subject matter. Watercolor is particularly amenable to this approach because colors will mix and flow freely.

2. Let it dry completely – don’t even look at it.

3. Sometime later (24 hours, a week, a year, doesn’t matter), examine the image from all four sides of the canvas or paper. It is a Rorschach test. Look for shapes, colors, or other possible clues and then – paint a painting from your imagination.

These are two such experiments. The first one, Cinderella, is upside down from how I first envisioned it as I unsuccessfully attempted to adapt my Stage 1-and-2 image into a flower. Bonus points to anybody who can figure out why I titled it Cinderella.

The second one, Mona Lisa Disco Queen, involved a lot of staring at the Stage 1-and-2 image. I saw nothing to work with, and was about to abandon ship. Then I noticed how much a small section along the edge reminded me of the Mona Lisa’s hairline. The rest is mystery. It looks way more like a doodle from one of my college notebooks than a painting by somebody with a passing ability in how it’s done. Does that part look like a dinosaur? Sure, put it in. What the heck, add a midget elephant too. Why not? It’s already the Mona Lisa Disco Queen.

Once, during the stone age of my painting life, I grew so frustrated with my efforts not accomplishing my brain’s bidding that I loaded the brush with paint and wrote “RATS!” across the whole thing. Momentarily satisfying, but foolish. When I looked at the painting a few months later I thought, well, it’s not all that bad. If I hadn’t written RATS! all over it I could maybe do a couple of things to salvage a painting somewhere between half decent and not-too-shabby. That experience prompts me to place these two duds here for all to see. To me these are non-marketable, silly, and – frankly – amateur. But it is also possible that they, like RATS! before them, may hold the seed of something I might want to continue, salvage, or enhance down the road. It is further possible that some other beholder, maybe even you, will think I’m just being a Mona Lisa Drama Queen and like one or the other of these, or both.

Anything is possible.