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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.