What Remains

Over the summer, I took some time off of commissioned work to try and put to bed the large personal piece I'd been working on and to see if I could get a couple additional pieces done along the way. As luck would have it, my health got in the way to a certain extent and I ended up not getting quite as much done as I'd hoped. While I'm quite fortunate that the type of issues I was having weren't life-threatening, they did prove uncomfortable and painful enough to keep me from my usual routine.

But I digress. This post isn't about health issues. It's about the fact that I ended up finishing that piece.

This is basically what it looked like through most of the beginning of the year:

The undeveloped space in the lower right hand corner was a problem. It originally was meant to be aged and rusty armor piled up and covered in moss and growth. But after mocking it up several ways, I became pretty dissatisfied with that direction. Dissatisfaction eventually yielded to uncertainty and before I knew it I was completely without direction. And so the painting sat in this unfinished state for a few additional months.

In June I finally got fed up with it and did something I was formerly reluctant to do: I asked for help. I sent the above photo to a couple close artist friends for their opinion. Their feedback was huge and was fairly consistent across the board. I chose the thoughts and ideas that really worked for me and got back to work.

Unfortunately, I failed to document a full day's worth of work wherein I began to fill in the great mystery spot in the lower right hand corner by continuing the architecture from above. After doing that, I began to destroy that very architecture and reveal the environment beyond.

One of the things I find kind of funny is at the beginning of this painting, the left column was going to be broken (as evidenced by this post). It's interesting to me that I eventually circled right back to that idea (with a little help from my friends, of course).

When I got to this point, I decided that I'd destroyed quite enough of the building and decided to start adding more moths — an element that had always been part of the piece from an early stage.

Once the moths were finished, I decided to call it and signed it. Thus the largest painting I'd done since college was completed.

The painting is oil on stretched linen, measures thirty inches wide by forty inches tall, and is titled What Remains.