Saturday, September 18, 2010

painting over paintings and the no peeking jar .... and how they go together ...


here's what i've been thinking about ... painting over an old painting ... or two or three or seven ...

so the question is ... when do you do it ...

did you know that they the mona lisa was painted over something else ... maybe not a finished piece, but at least a misstart .... is miss-start not a real word? ... that was rhetorical ...

on my recent trip to nyc and the picasso exhibit at the met, i saw a slide show (powerpoint?) showing how he'd painted over sections of paintings and what he'd left behind ....

so ... i painted over a painting ... and have it in my head to do more ... if it hasn't sold in a certain amount of time and i don't want it in MY house, what to do? i have one friend who got VERY mad at me last time i painted over a piece ...

opinions? have you done it? do you support me doing it?

and ... in lieu of actual art to show you ... i'll show you one of the joys in my house ....
that jar says: small jar, big fun ... and no peeking ...

back story: we like to go out to eat ... but usually go out to eat without much forethought ... hop in the car, where we going? and then it's a big discussion ... with five of us and five different ideas of where we should be going.... which way we go on our first turn has had us stopped infinitely .... we mostly went to a handful of default restaurants ... same ole' same old .... until, at one of our dinners out, i got a piece of paper and a pen ... and we wrote down EVERY restaurant that we could think of that was a reasonable choice for dinner ... mexican, italian, chinese, pizza ... maybe five different pizza places even ....maybe thirty restaurants total... so we wrote them all down... when we got home, we cut them up, folded them up, and stuck them in that jar (formerly a votive candle) .... now, when we want to go out to dinner all together and don't have a plan, one of the five of us picks it out .... the rule is no peeking, no arguing, no nay saying ... and where we pick is where we go ...

we've been doing it about 6 months i think ... we've maybe gone to 10 of the restaurants... ok, i just had sophie go through the been there jar, we've done it 8 times.... and we still have a lot to go ...

so far it has been great ... tonight we went to elwood's .... a favorite pizza place that we certainly don't go to often enough .... i'm glad the blue jar karma had us go there tonight ....

so there you go ... we had a not great thing, squabbling about where to eat out, and we made it this total joy thing in a little blue glass jar .... so that's kind of like painting over a picture ... trying to make something better .... instead of letting something bug you, you fix it ... right?

what's bugging you? how are you going to fix it?
how many paintings can i paint over before it is excessive?

3 comments:

artmom said...

Just wrote a great comment and the silly thing disappeared and won't "undo"!
The crux of it, yes I over paint and sometimes the underpainting is a great part of the final image!

Darla said...

Do-overs sometimes give you unexpected and wonderful results. I say paint over a canvas if it isn't "speaking" to you.

Love your idea about choosing your destination from the blue glass jar.

Darla

cath c said...

the restaurant jar is a great idea!

i think of painting over a painting a lot like getting over an old poem. it can be hard to let go of, but is hanging onto doing any good? that's a perfectly good viable canvas!

another way to look at it, as a potter. sometimes, if that clay isn't speaking to you in one form, it's time to mash it back down and start again, completely new.