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In my last Blog entry, I discussed my sometimes fanatic drive to paint a scene more than once. The mysterious Case of the Weeping Cherry Tree involved my lack of satisfaction in how a previous painting turned out; however, there are myriad reasons to paint something more than once. Sometimes you like a painting fine but just want to try the same subject in a different style.

Back in 2020, I whimsically named a mountain outside Banff “Mt. Bader Ginsburg.” That is of course not its real name. The painting hangs in my studio in a place where I see it every day. I’m not thrilled with it, but I’m not necessarily unsatisfied with it either. To me it’s a middling example of what I can accomplish when I paint with oils. Seeing it so often led me to think that I’d like to paint the mountain again in a looser, more rugged style. After all, Mt. Not Really Bader Ginsburg is a massive, rugged, sedimentary rock leviathan. It’s HUGE.

So I put away the paintbrushes, picked up a bunch of palette knives, pulled out the reference photos and sat. And thought. And after all that pondering I decided to ask Siri to play Robin Trower. I turned up the volume, got in the zone, and furiously troweled on paint like a brick-layer in a wall building race. This painting was completed in two Trower-powered sessions using 99% palette knife and 1% dabbing with an old T-shirt. Is it better or worse or just different from the original Mt. Not Really Bader Ginsburg painting? While that’s totally subjective, I vastly prefer the overall feel of this one. To my eye it is more painterly.

Take, for example, the tall evergreens in the bottom left quadrant. In Mt. Not Really Bader Ginsburg,  the down-sweeping tree branch style is obvious. In the palette knife painting they are indiscriminate shapes that only seem tree-like when viewed from a distance. It think the rock in the new version better suggests something enormous and hard. The same water seems different is the two versions, and as it turns out I prefer the sky as depicted in the first painting. C’est la vie.

Next, I decided that I should learn the actual name of this mountain. I went online and looked at maps of Banff and its environs. As far as I could tell from all the maps, it looked to be either Cascade Mountain or Stoney Squaw Mountain. I sent a jpeg of the painting to Mountain Galleries in Banff asking if they know its name (and sneakily, but ultimately pointlessly, hoping to get some critical comment on the merits of the painting from the gallery management). They did not bite, either on the mountain’s name or the painting. The smarter approach I took next was to send a copy of the reference photo I used to the rafting company from whose watercraft the photo was taken. I heard immediately from Tim at Rocky Mountain Raft Tours that these paintings depict the north face of Mt. Rundle. Or, more accurately, the lower half of the north face. Like I said above, Mt. Rundle is big; the canvas would need to be double in size to get the full height.

Mount Rundle is to Banff as the Statue of Liberty is to New York City. You see the former, you know the setting is the latter. You’d think I would have known this all along, but, hey...old dogs.

Tune pollution, also known as an earworm, is when you can't get rid of a song stuck in your head and it drives you crazy the way an apple peel stuck in your teeth does. I'll name a random song right now: Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard by Paul Simon. Chances are that some percentage of you readers will have this song stuck in your heads - with my apologies - for the rest of the day.

A similar, but not identical, frustration can happen to me with paintings. If I paint something and don't like the way it turns out, one of two actions will occur. In most cases, the painting just goes into the Oh Well pile and is forgotten. Sometimes, though, it goes into what I'll call the Dammit pile and I will paint the same scene again. And again. This most often happens with portraits, where my record is the seven (seven!) attempts to satisfactorily paint Carrie P playing cello in my backyard when she was maybe in Grade 8 or 9. In that case, there were three attempts within a two or three month period then I would try again every year or so. By the time I completed the one (shown here) that satisfied me, Carrie had probably graduated college. And if I'm being honest, it does not totally satisfy me, but the compulsion - the painting earworm, as it were - went away.

Maggie R (now Maggie B) took maybe four tries. On the first attempt I "got" her likeness, but the brush work nauseated me, and it took three more tries to get it right. In this case it was one after the other because a graduation deadline loomed. 

I have painted Iceland’s Gulfoss waterfall numerous times, and Lake Louise and Moraine Lake from the same vantage point three times each. Sometimes just goofing around, sometimes trying to be painterly. I cannot tell you what informs the choice between Oh Well and Dammit. I only know that it happens. 

What you see in the image opening this blog is attempt number two at the weeping cherry tree down the street from where I live. I like it better than the first one - described in a prior blog - but am still not entirely happy. To me the most truly beautiful watercolors look like the brush touched the paper only a few dozen times.  Look at Maggie R again - the watercolor itself is mostly suggestion, not attempting to replicate every detail. When this happens the magic inspires art studio happy dancing, in which a large bear of a man flops around like Snoopy. Possibly not a pretty sight, but a wonderful feeling.

Will this tree become my latest White Whale, driving me to manically try and try again? Hard to say.

But it might.