New paintings, hot off the easel, and some thoughts on art and life ...

I'm close to the end of my year-long painting project, which I started on Nov. 1, 2012. I'm still painting flowers from my garden, but these past few weeks I've had less to show for it. That's partly because there have been a couple of failed paintings, but mostly it's because I'm working on a big triptych that's not yet finished. So instead of blog silence, I'm posting the work-in-progress. 

The photo above shows the three panels lined up in my studio. The middle one was finished first, but I keep making adjustments to it as the other two panels progress. As always in painting, changes in one area affect another area. That's true of any painting, but in a big one like this some parts were painted long before others, and that separation in time makes a difference. My mood last month when I painted the first areas may have been different, and now I have to bring everything into harmony. That's a problem I hadn't anticipated, but a fun one to solve.