Day 34: The Denouement

I don't know if any other painters, writers, or musicians go through this, but after finishing a painting,I get into a funk. It's very similar to the way I felt when my first hamster, Scamster, died when I was 8 years old. I was attached to the critter, but I knew hamsters don't live forever so I fully anticipated his expiration.
In reality, it was a little different with Scamster. He got the dreaded nearly always fatal hamster disease, "wet tail", and I had to force feed him medicated Kool-aid through an eyedropper. One day, I over-medicated the little furball and sent him careening into a 24 hour coma from which he never arose. The experience was more traumatic than it needed to be. Kind of like my last Jellyfish No. 1, which I killed and resurrected.
Like I said, I always go through similar feelings when I finish a painting. I need to be working on something, always, and when I'm not I kind of freak out a little bit. What worked when I was a sullen child mourning my dead pet was to move on, and buy a replacement. So, using my theory on the hamsterdeath/painting relationship, I've found that immediately starting a new painting the moment I finish the last one is the best way to avoid the grieving process entirely. RIP Scamster.
That, being said, I'm pretty sick of jellyfish at the moment. I just finished this one today: I like where its at, I might add some glazes from time to time over the next couple of weeks as the paint dries.
The entire reason that I decided to paint them was that they are truly beautiful creatures, but frankly I was trying to push myself beyond painting photo realistically. I have a hard time giving up control and tend to paint very meticulously and methodically. And thanks to the obsessive compulsive genes that I've inherited from my father's side of the family, and the perfectionism that I've inherited from my mother's, this is a completely satisfying way to work. Still, I'm trying to push myself to experiment with techniques, subject matter, and methodology. I surmise that painting things that in life were already visually abstract would make abstracting them on canvasses easier for my brain to accept. It's like Dr. Leo Marven suggests in, "What About Bob?"...

That being said, I'm taking a break from the little jellyfuckers and indulging in the more violent part of my nature to work on my post apocalyptic series, which involves collecting disturbing images, combining them in unexpected and unsettling ways with my own imagery, and turning them into an eerie collages. And then, lastly, converting that to a drawing/painting. I truly love this process because it takes very little skill for the way I think, I get to take a break from oil paint, and its completely creative. Here are a couple of ones that I have done in the past.


I really enjoy expressing the more turbulent and volatile ideas I have through this medium and through watercolor as well. I want to turn these images into huge drawings (which I will consider a painting, let's not have a semantic argument). But, I'm pretty careless about taking care of my work, and I live with 3 men and a rabid dog, so I fear for the safety of a piece of paper that big. Working on the floor is definitely out (see: dog hair, cigarette ash, boot prints). I'm already running out of space in my studio. But, alas, when there's a will, there's a way.